Height proves vital for employment

With his bearing erect, his turban resplendent, and his closely tailored doorman’s uniform almost shining under the lights at a Taj Mahal hotel in New Delhi, Bijay Pal Singh looks taller, grander and almost more dignified than many of the guests he helps usher into one of the Capital’s most prestigious hotels.He is 6ft 2 inches tall and, in a country of short men, Singh holds an ace card. He outgrew the national average—about 5ft 6 inches for men—when he was just about 12, he remembers, and since then, literally speaking, he has towered over most of India. His height, he says, got him a good job in the army, working for an artillery regiment. And when he retired after 17 years and nine months of being a soldier, hoping to spend time closer to his family in Haryana, he heard about this job, a job that required, above all, that he be tall.

 “How tall I am matters,” Singh says, on a quiet Saturday afternoon, as the rush of customers ebbed. “I couldn’t have gotten this job without my height.” Working for the Indian Hotels Co. Ltd, the Tata group company that owns the Taj Hotels chain, he has managed to carve out for himself and his family a life on the bottom rungs of India’s aspiring middle class. The monthly pay has been decent (between Rs8,000 and Rs12,000), Singh is eligible for a pension, and he has found a pride in his job that he never had before. One son, 6ft 3 inches, works in Dubai, and another, 6ft 1 inch, will soon enter college. Someday, he says, “God willing”, maybe they, too, can afford a room at a place like the Taj Mahal Hotel, where a night’s stay for him would easily eat up more than a month’s earnings.

For the hotel, the doormen are a flourish that it spends considerable resources and time over. Their uniforms—an ensemble that makes the doormen look almost royal—are prescribed by a fashion designer. Their training, which revolves around both being hosts and being part of an elaborate security team, is almost never-ending, says security manager Vipin Sharma, to whom all the doormen report. Every morning, the doormen are given a list of guests who will check in, and they have to remember the names of the regulars. Singh reckons he remembers more than 600 names, among them guests with very public faces. “Tony Blair, Narendra Modiji, the Chinese prime minister, film stars—so many film stars,” he says. At other times, they keep the riff-raff out and keep an eye out for troublemakers— drunks, prostitutes, “guests” who have left without paying their bills. But above all, no matter how high the sun climbs into the sky on a merciless Delhi summer day, or how chilly the wind blows on an almost-freezing night, they must, at all times, look regal.