Where hospitality begins

Hospitality has always been my first language, my mother tongue, the soft grammar of my childhood and the steady rhythm of my adulthood.

- Suvir Saran

Long before I learned how to write a recipe, compose a critique, or craft a column, I knew the temperature of a welcome.I knew how a room could shift simply because someone lit a lamp with love. I knew how the fragrance of dal could become a dialect of comfort, how a glass of water placed with intention could speak louder than any polished speech.

Hospitality, for me, was never a profession. It was a pulse. A quiet heartbeat beneath meals, moments, and meetings, the hidden hum beneath how humans hold each other. And so when Shafquat Ali invited me to write a bimonthly column for Hospitality Horizon, he didn’t simply offer me space. He entrusted me with a purpose: to explore hospitality not as a business, but as a breathtaking, fragile, ferocious human instinct.

I am not here only to speak of properties or praise plates. I am here to travel into the emotional undercurrents of hospitality — the joy, the exhaustion, the grace, the grit, the glamour, the grief, and the ghosts. Because hospitality is not built from buildings and bedsheets. It is built from breaths and beings. It is choreography, architecture, geometry, intuition. It is the soft architecture of affection, the geometry of generosity, the steady science of seeing someone clearly and making room for them exactly as they are.

In these pages, I want to tell the stories that hide behind the shine. The feelings behind the facade. The emotions beneath elegance. The human stories behind the celebrity of a restaurant — the quiet craftsmen whose hands steady the flame, the stars who polish the sheen of a menu long before it arrives at your table, the magic makers who work invisibly so that you may feel visible.