Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Turning a new leaf

Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times

Raj Merchant cures patients with the help of leaves

Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai

As I talk with naturopath Dr Raj Merchant, I am wracked by a persistent cough. He stares at me for a few moments, takes a bottle from his table, unscrews the cap and puts a drop on my fingertip. “Just place it on your tongue,” he says. I do so and, within moments, I can feel a soothing sensation at the base of my throat. “You will no longer cough for the rest of the interview,” Merchant says, with the confidence of one who has seen this happen all the time. And so, the interview carries on smoothly.
Merchant, (61), has an unusual way of treating people: he uses leaves, either in natural form, or grinded to a paste or in liquid form, as his medicine. Some of the leaves he uses are those of the bougainvillea, guava, periwinkle, the tulsi, the money plant, the cactus, the flame of the forest and karipatta. “I prefer karipatta because it is freely available and everybody knows what it is,” he says. “It helps to control blood pressure, kidney and digestive disorders, among other things. In fact, all leaves have medicinal properties.”
If you have fever, he says, the treatment is simple: just go to your neighbourhood flower seller, buy 50 tulsi leaves, wash it properly, “because of the presence of pesticides”, grind it, mix it with water and drink it. “Within ten minutes, you will start perspiring and the fever will go down,” he says.
Merchant provides treatment for jaundice, joint pains, paralysis, heart problems, asthma, thyroid, cancer, migraines and the common cold. For my sore throat, he had given a concoction of mint and several other leaves.
So how did this story begin? Years ago, when he was a young man, he had gone to a place near Gir forest in Gujarat for a wedding. In those days, the weddings lasted three days, and, one morning, feeling bored, he climbed a nearby hillock and saw a man meditating under a tree. “His aura drew me towards him” he says. “I sat next to him for two hours and then he asked me, ‘What do you want?’ I replied, ‘Nothing. I like you and I like the peace here and I don’t know what made me sit next to you.’”
After a while, Merchant told the man, Mukherjee Babu, about his grandmother who had fallen sick and doctors were talking of amputating her leg. So Mukherjee gave him a plant and asked him to grind it and use it as a paste over parts of her body, which was causing pain. “He also told me that I should make my grandmother drink the juice of French beans,” he says. His grandmother recovered, the leg was saved and Merchant became a convert. A few months later, he returned and stayed with Mukherjee for a week and learned a lot more about the medical properties of leaves.
Meanwhile, his father had an industrial unit making electric insulators and after graduating in commerce from Sydenham College, Merchant began assisting him. But, after his father died in 1977, he found it difficult to sustain the business. “So, in 1978, I took the plunge and became a full-fledged naturopath,” he says. “It needed a lot of nerve to do it.”
Merchant operated from his home, which he inherited from his father. You have to see it, to believe it. It is only a ten-minute walk from Malad railway station, on the eastern side, and it is a paradise: an acre of greenery. Apart from the main building, the clinic is housed on one side and the room is large and spacious. Through the open windows, you can see the trees, with the leaves a shimmering green because the monsoon rain has washed off all the dust. Opposite the house is the Army’s Central Ordnance Depot, a swathe of land running into a couple of hundred acres. So there is no sound, except for the most unusual one: the squeal of squirrels as they rush up and down tree trunks. Incidentally, Merchant gets the leaves from around his house, the Aarey Milk Colony, which is 2 kms away, and from a 28-acre farm in Vashi where he grows all types of plants; it belongs to a friend.
“Initially, I had a very tough time,” he says. “People could not believe that I could treat them with leaves. Those were the days when everybody found it difficult to accept herbal treatments.”
But when the few patients he treated began to heal, more patients began to trickle through word of mouth. Luckily for him, he was able to cure a couple of journalists who had been suffering from piles. “When I received media coverage, the trickle became a flood,” he says. Today, he receives between ten to fifteen patients a day and, for most of them, when it comes to payment, he points to a white donation box that lies on a bench in his clinic. “I have seen the suffering of people,” he says. “So, instead of demanding something from them, I want them to give willingly. I use the money I get to provide free medicine for poor people.”
And there is another good side effect: “I have a good night’s sleep, I have mental peace, I am very happy and at this age, I just want to serve people as much as I can.”

The human touch, 24 x 7

Permission to reproduce this article has to be obtained from Hindustan Times

Lobby managers in five-star hotels are on call all the time and learn to deal with crisis and celebrations, with equanimity

Shevlin Sebastian
Mumbai


Jayantika Gandhi breaks out into a laugh, as she remembers that particular night. It was 11 p.m. and, as the front desk manager of the J.W. Marriott hotel, she was in the lobby when a drunk Non-Resident Indian, in shorts and T-shirt and sandals, came up to her, looking upset. He told her he had been denied entry into the nightclub. The reason: he was wearing open-ended shoes. Jayantika told him this was the dress code. “He asked me why was there such a code,” she says, the laughter still suffusing her eyes. “I told him this was to protect him from women’s heels and broken glasses. He then said, ‘Why are only ladies allowed to wear open-ended shoes and stiletto heels?’
‘Well,’ I told him, ‘there are some global dress codes by which we abide by and one of them is that women are allowed to wear open-ended shoes and heels.’ But I was actually flummoxed by his question because he had a point.”
On the other side of town, Rahul Singh, assistant manager, front office, of the ITC Grand Central Sheraton tells the story of an Australian businessman, who was staying in one of the suites. One morning, he came down to the lobby and said he needed a car. So Singh organised a Skoda for him. “He sat in the back seat, shook his head and said, ‘I feel claustrophobic. I can’t sit in this car,’” says Singh. “Now, the Skoda is a fairly big car. So I got him a Camry. He went out for half a day and said, ‘I just can’t sit in a Camry. Can you get me a Mercedes?’ And for the next ten days, wherever he went, he used a Mercedes and, you know, it costs a whopping amount of money to hire one. I won’t say he was a show-off. It was just that he was used to a certain kind of lifestyle.”
These are some examples of what a front-desk or lobby or guest relations manager faces during the course of a day’s work. When you walk into any five-star lobby, these are the people who approach you and enquire politely about whether they could be of help. You are so used to their presence that you tend not to pay much attention to them even though they are the public face of the hotel. But unknown to you, they see and observe a lot.
Variety of life
“I meet all sorts of people,” says Coleen Lobo, the guest relations manager of the Grand Hyatt. “Some of the guests, especially the foreigners, love to chat and are eager to know about Indian culture. Because of their tight schedules, they are unable to explore the city. There are others who like to be left alone and they only come to you if they have some specific requests.”
Says Jaideep Malhotra (name changed), assistant manager, front office of a five-star hotel: “Most of the time I get high-end people. Which means, they are usually well-behaved.”
Most of them are, indeed, well behaved but there are those who pop in, to use the loo and pop out. “You can’t do anything about it because you cannot stop a guest from walking in,” says Brian Miranda, assistant manager, front office, Hyatt Regency.
Singh breaks into a smile as he tells me that some of the most famous people in Mumbai come in, just to use the loo of the Sheraton. “I don’t do anything about it because I don’t want to make any guest feel unwanted,” he says.
Other tricky situations occur when a ‘woman of questionable character’ enters the lobby.
“Of course, entry to the rooms is at the discretion of the hotel,” says Miranda. “If a guest comes in with a woman, our policy is that if the guest is registered on a double occupancy, he is free to take anyone up to his room. If he is on a single occupancy, we would request him to register his colleague as a friend.” Some hotels have a strict ‘no-no’ policy. Says Malhotra: “We stop the woman. We inform her of the hotel policy and she usually leaves. If a guest comes in with a woman, we check whether he has a single occupancy booking and if yes, we stop her.”
And, of course, there is the perennial problem of guests or visitors drinking too much and making a nuisance of themselves. Says Lobo: “I would repeatedly request the man to lower his voice if he is speaking loudly as I would not want the other guests to be disturbed. If he remains out of control, I will eventually call in security.”
On high alert
Clearly, this is not an easy job. On an average, a lobby manager deals with more than a hundred guests a day. So what exactly are the qualities he or she needs, to be good at the job? “You need to have lots of patience and a passion for the job,” says Gandhi. “You should enjoy talking with people. You need to be calm and level-headed. There are situations where, if you lose your cool, the situation will go out of control.”
To achieve control, it helps if you know how to anticipate things. “For example, if a guest is coming in very late and he is flying out early the next morning, he would like the check-in to be done very quickly,” says Malhotra. “I will also ask him immediately at what time he would need the car to go to the airport.”
Hard day’s night
When you view lobby managers from a distance, it would seem like a glamourous job. Here they are, working in a five-star hotel, getting salaries, which are not to be sneezed at, and meeting VIP’s, achievers and well-heeled professionals all the time. Yet, there are regrets.
“It is on public holidays, like Republic Day, when everything is shut, I would, sometimes, wish I was in another profession,” says Gandhi. “Because of the unpredictable nature of our work--a crisis can crop up any time--you can’t plan your social life in advance.”
Says Malhotra: “You are working when the world is asleep. On festival days, like Christmas and New Year’s Eve, people are partying and you are working. That can be tough.”
But all of them say, with a shining enthusiasm on their faces, that they love their jobs, be it Gandhi or Singh or Miranda or Lobo. “It is the variety of people that we meet that makes this job so fascinating,” says Lobo. As Gandhi describes it eloquently, “The hotel is like a theatre where you look your best and your dialogues have to be perfect.” Singh is not far behind in eloquence: “The lobby manager is the human touch between the walls of the hotel and the guests.”