Hindustan Times
Mughal Diary
One doesn’t associate ITC with international awards. So any award for an ITC property – like the Tatler award for the world’s best city spa that went to Kaya Kalp, at Agra’s Mughal Hotel – has, almost by definition, to be based solely on merit…
Day One
The car to Agra arrives at my door at nine in the morning. I dawdle and make it down half an hour later, a mistake, because the Mughal has sent a bright young manager to make sure that everything is okay and the poor man has been kept waiting along with the driver.
I’m off to Kaya Kalp, the spa at Agra’s Mughal Hotel. I know the hotel well. Along with Madras’ Chola it was among ITC’s first hotels and won the Aga Khan award for architecture soon after it opened.
It is a huge property (35 acres in all), partly conceived of by Bikki Oberoi (it was to be an Oberoi hotel till Ajit Haksar of ITC decided to start his own chain) and it is like an early prototype of the Vilas properties with which Bikki later revolutionised India’s hotel industry. The property is single storeyed (no lifts are needed) and spread out so you are never far from a garden.
That said, I haven’t been here since the Musharraf-Vajpayee summit. At that time, I thought the hotel had begun to look a little old and rundown. Then, the Oberois opened Amar Vilas to the public and the Mughal began to seem even tattier.
So why am I going back? Well, mainly because the hotel has opened a new spa called Kaya Kalp. Given that ITC has no track record in this area, I was leery of the claims made for the Mughal’s spa. Then, Kaya Kalp won the Tatler award for the world’s best city spa. As this award usually goes to incredibly expensive hotels abroad, I was startled to find that an Indian hotel had won it. I was even more astonished to discover that ITC’s first full-fledged stab at the spa market had yielded such quick results. Also, at the risk of sounding a little unkind, one doesn’t associate ITC (except the Bukhara restaurant) with international awards. Unlike other Indian chains (the Oberois in particular) it has very little understanding of how to lobby the foreign travel press and no sense of international PR. So any award for an ITC property has – almost by definition – to be based solely on merit.
So here I am, being driven to Agra, to see if the Mughal has changed and what this award-wining spa is like.
It takes just over three hours to get to the hotel. The Mughal is as I remember – but in the days when it first opened. The run-down feeling it had given me on my last visit has vanished. It gleams with efficiency (at least partly attributable to Anil Chaddha, a veteran of the Maurya and Calcutta’s Sonar who finally has his own property to run) and they seem to have added water bodies and fountains to the acres of garden.
I am a little surprised. This looks better than Amar Vilas. Lunch is Chinese and then it is off to the spa. Now, I’m stunned.
Kaya Kalp is probably the largest spa I have seen. It is almost a hotel within a hotel, built on two-and-a-half acres of land, with its own gardens, swimming pool and porch. It’s hard to believe that outside these walls is the bustle of Agra.
The spa itself is nothing short of spectacular. It occupies 99,000 square feet, and the treatment rooms with their cool marble floors and walls are a terrific blend of an East Asian aesthetic with Taj-style Mughal architecture. (Later I learn that Pradeep Sachdeva, a Delhi architect, collaborated with Bangkok’s PG4 Design on the spa.)
The spa manager Melissa Wong is overseas Chinese from Malaysia and she has fifteen spa therapists from Thailand, Tibet (local Tibetans plus Chinese Tibetans) and India.
I opt for the hotel’s signature treatment, the Kaya Kalp massage, which combines aromatherapy with a little Swedish and a little Thai massage.
My therapist is Thai and though the massage is elaborate – the traditional foot bath is turned to a full-fledged ritual – and the room stunningly beautiful, I fall asleep as I am being massaged. That’s always the sign of a good massage and I wake up, totally refreshed.
Dinner is at Peshawari. Because ITC wants Delhi’s Bukhara to be one of a kind, it does not allow other hotels to use the name. But they can certainly use the menu. The Mughal’s Peshawari is a Bukhara clone (down to the uncomfortable stools – so useful for turning tables over quickly) but prices are much lower in Agra than in Delhi.
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