IF you�re going to be visiting Amritsar in the future for whatever reason, I would recommend that you stay at the Ritz Plaza on Mall Road over there. Not just recommend, I would strongly suggest it. Even insist. Not only is it the best hotel in the Holy City, but its got some wonderful people owning and operating it. And the food there is tops! The hotel is two kilometres from the picturesque Amritsar Railway Station and 12 from the international airport. It is also a ten-minute drive from the Golden Temple and 21 km from the Wagah border with Pakistan. The hotel�s rooms are all centrally air-conditioned for the scorching summers and heated for the killer winters. It offers all modern four-star comforts and is a happy, cheerful place. The kind of hotel where you wouldn�t miss a swimming pool if there wasn�t any. But the Ritz Plaza has one, anyway. Just as it has colour TVs with remotes and an extensive room service menu, things that cannot be taken for granted in other Amritsar hotels.

Mall Road is Amritsar�s very elite locale. And the Ritz Plaza, which was established in 1963, has got a charming little history and an impressive guest list that includes if I mistake not the Queen of England. I put in a couple of nights and came away richer for the experience. And with a couple of new friends to add to my Christmas list as well. These include the hotelier�s family, led by a delightful Punjabi matriarch, Sumati Rani Mehra, and her tall, strapping Punjab da puttar son, Ajit. The hotel�s general manager, Pradeep Kumar Vaid, is quite a card too. And so are its chefs, Rajeev Thakur and Kunwar Singh Ranwat. Plus, two nights and three days in the Mehra family�s company, and they take you out into the city to meet their friends and Amritsar�s premier citizens, Dr. Rajbir Singh, the noted eye specialist, and his teacher wife Rita. You can count on dinner one night at the good doctor�s home. They are among the most hospitable people of the city and take you to their bosom with a warmth that is rare elsewhere in the country.

The Ritz Plaza is a three star hotel, it has 50 simple but comfortable rooms, a bar, a restaurant called Ranjit�s that is named after Mrs. Mehra�s late elder son, a banquet hall, lawns, and it houses the offices of the Uzebekistan Airways and Turkmenistan Airlines. Who flies by these carriers you may wonder. Go to Amritsar Airport and you will find it has 14 international flights a week, plus Indian Airlines is linked to Sharjah from here. The Mehras are the GSAs I think for the two foreign airlines. They also have a travel and tourist agency, a car rental service, and they cater Indian food to the passengers and crew of these airlines.

Never mind what happens in the rest of the country, the Ritz Plaza does a hundred per cent occupancy round the year. Its clients include corporate types on work, pilgrims to the Golden Temple, tourists. And since it is managed by the Sarovar Park Plaza chain of hotels, you can look at making reservations here from most cities of the country. The Sarovar people provide the Mehras with management to run the hotel. And the hotel is run by an extremely efficient and affable general manager in Mr. Vaid. Ajit Mehra, the Punjab da puttar, is fully into promoting the hotel�s new flight kitchen. He�s just finished renovating 24 rooms and is hoping to complete the rest soon. His clientele is made up of 30 per cent foreign tourists, 20 per cent Indian, and 50 per cent of the business class. The foreigners are either on their way to Dharamshala or the Golden Temple. �And having the offices of two international airlines on the hotel counts,� he says. �They have directories all over the world and I�m listed on them!� The hotel�s USP, he claims, is its food. �My father who started this hotel believed in good food, and so do I,� he says. He admits that after the Sarovar Park Plaza took over the management in 1997, the difference has been tangible. �They�re very professional. It was a good idea to tie up with them. We now work as a team. And that makes a difference.�

His mother, a large, roly-poly and jovial Punjabi woman, plays the role of the guardian angel in the hotel . �I�m the Lakshmi,� says old Sumati Rani Mehra. �I don�t go into details about the operations but I oversee everything and step on people�s toes when things go wrong!� She would, too, she�s quite a formidable kind. Her husband, Devinder Chand Mehra, who came from Afghanistan and who was in the tea business before he became a hotelier, is still something of a legend in Amritsar. She talks about coming to Amritsar in 1953 from Abbottbad, the summer capital of Pakistan, and getting married to D.C. Mehra. �It was a court marriage, a hundred per cent arranged, no sword, no horse, and Amritsar was far less crowded then. The hotel was started because the Mehra family was the GSA for the Afghan airlines Ariana, and the airlines wanted a decent hotel for its crew to stay on it Amritsar. We opened in 1963. The travel agency followed and soon after, the car rental service.

And Mrs. Mehra talks about how holy Amritsar has always been because of the presence of the Golden Temple there. How despite being kilometres away from Pakistan, it has survived the wars, and it has outlived terrorism. �There�s a holy canopy over the city... Guruji�s here,� she says religiously. How the bad period for the city and the hotel was from 1984 to 1988, from Operation Blue Star and thereafter. And all the foreigner were asked to leave the city. �Including the 20 media people, the BBC and Reuters chaps, who were staying with us.� But the hotel has survived all that and today, people return to the Ritz Plaza with fond memories of it hospitality and the food.

Good food is also what the Mehras will take you to have at the sprawling mansion of their friends, Dr. Rajbir and Rita Singh. He runs the Dr. Sohan Singh Eye Hospital in Amritsar with his father, Dr. Ranbir Singh, and brother, Dr. Pritam Singh. The whole family is made up doctors specialising in vitreous retina medical science. �Ophthalmology is on our genes, my grandfather, Dr. Sohan Singh, was the eye surgeon to the British viceroy and a well-known man in Amritsar,� Dr. Rajbir says proudly, �and my son Ajay is now training to be an ophthalmologist at Mangalore.� He is Punjab�s first retina specialist and his father, Dr. Ranbir, at 85, still involves himself with the hospital and manages the second shift and does general ophthalmology. They look like brothers, this father-son doctor duo.

Rita, meanwhile, is the principal of the Senior Models School of Amritsar, which is located in their residence at 21 Cantt Area on Mall Road. It is Amritsar�s first nursery school. �I started 25 years ago with seven students and now have 400,� she says. Her alumni have gone on to become big people and she names Gunjan Saxena, a woman IAF pilot who flew choppers in Kargil during the war.

The family entertains most weekends and on a fairly grand and lavish scale. The food is mainly Punjabi and it is prepared by their chef, Charanjit, who has been trained by Rita herself. The night I was taken there by the Mehras, Charanjit had excelled himself and produced an assorted menu of Punjabi fare like Masalawale Chicken, Palak Mutton, Mutter Paneer, Maa Ki Dal. And plenty of tandoori dishes. When the weather is good, then the Singhs entertain on their lawns. And their guests often are visiting eye surgeons from abroad, or people from Amritsar itself. �It is a small town, everybody knows everybody,� says Dr. Ranbir shyly. He doesn�t mention that everybody in Amritsar knows the Singh family of doctors and is happy to make their acquaintance and be entertained by them as well.