5 min readUpdated: Jul 17, 2026 10:43 PM IST
There are hoteliers who run hotels, and then there are hoteliers who understand the secret life of a hotel: the choreography behind the curtain, the nervous system beneath the marble, the invisible decisions required before a guest can say, “What a lovely stay.”
Nakul Anand belongs to the second tribe.
He officially retired from ITC in January 2024, after 45 years with the company. Officially is the operative word. Since then, Anand has behaved less like a man who has checked out and more like a guest granted permanent late checkout. He has invested in Shiftz, become patron-in-chief of FAITH, remained a mentor, and continued speaking about tourism and leadership. Retirement, in his case, appears to be a room category permanently unavailable.
Now comes The Night Manager: Memoirs of a Hospitality Student, his second book and a larger offering after Hors D’Oeuvres: Small Bites, Big Flavours. If the earlier book served management wisdom canapé-style, this is the banquet: 278 pages of memory, method and management, plated by a lifelong student of what makes people feel looked after.
The title is apt. Anand joined ITC’s hotel division in 1978 as a general assistant trainee, an economics graduate entering a universe of gastriques, aperitifs and trained hoteliers. He bridged the gap and topped the programme. His first posting as night manager at Chola Sheraton in Chennai became an early laboratory. Years later, he recalled that being available for emergencies was not enough; he began thinking like the “night general manager”, examining electricity, manpower and everything for which the dark hours made him accountable.
That instinct is the spine of this memoir: never merely occupy the designation; enlarge it.
Anand rose to become a remarkably young general manager, served as managing director of ITC Hotels, and in 2011 joined the board of ITC as a whole-time director, overseeing hospitality, travel and tourism. He became the architect and persuasive evangelist of “Responsible Luxury”, proving sustainability need not arrive at a five-star hotel wearing a hair shirt. Under his watch, environmental responsibility learnt to speak the language of luxury, scale and global ambition.
The Night Manager is not a tell-all memoir in the modern sense. There are no overturned minibar trolleys of gossip. Anand is too much the consummate hotelier to leave dirty linen in the corridor. His disclosures are different: how standards are formed, how leaders learn, how institutions acquire character, and why hospitality is ultimately the business of noticing.
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There lies its international appeal. Its lessons travel from Singapore to São Paulo, Lausanne to London. Hotels everywhere sell rooms; great hoteliers create reassurance. Anand understands that luxury is not the chandelier but anticipation, not thread count but thought, not the scripted “good morning” but the intelligence to know when a guest needs conversation and when they need quiet.
If I must ring housekeeping with one small complaint, it is this: occasionally the mentor in Anand overtakes the memoirist. One longs for him to loosen his perfectly knotted tie, order something unsuitable from room service, and linger longer in the messier rooms of memory. The management lesson can arrive before the emotional turndown service is complete. But even this is charmingly him. Asking Nakul Anand not to extract a lesson from experience is like asking a concierge to notice your suitcase and do nothing.
What makes the book endearing is its subtitle: Memoirs of a Hospitality Student. After forty-five years, the title of Corporate Hotelier of the World 2019, and a career shaping one of India’s formidable hotel businesses, Anand still chooses “student”. Not emperor. Not legend. Student.
Perhaps that is his real legacy.
The finest people in hospitality know that the guest changes, the world changes, taste changes, technology changes, and yesterday’s perfection can become tomorrow’s tired upholstery. One must keep walking the floors. One must keep looking beneath the bed, behind the numbers, beyond the applause.
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Nakul Anand has retired from ITC. The evidence confirms it.
Has Nakul Anand retired from hospitality? The evidence laughs.
The Night Manager is his lobby after midnight: quiet, alive with unseen activity, illuminated by the energy of a man who believes there is always one more detail to improve, one more young hotelier to mentor, one more light to leave on.
He is of the world, and the world of hospitality is, unmistakably, a little of him.
