'Turban Cowboy' Vikram Chatwal rides again

Controversial hotelier Vikram Chatwal wants to set up hotels, make films and get involved in politics.

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There is disturbing similarity between the woman in the painting on the wall and the man seated in front of it. The woman is half hidden behind a curtain, her face partially emerging from the shadows. Like her, Vikram Chatwal, 42, is struggling to emerge from the controversies that have been a part of his life.

The American hotelier of Indian-origin, who is known for his flamboyant lifestyle and penchant for trouble, is in India for reasons both professional and personal. “It was my daughter Safira’s seventh birthday,” he says, a small smile softening his surprisingly serious expression. The pensive look he wears is not the kind one would associate with Chatwal, the ‘playboy’. “My daughter and I get to see each other five or six times a year,” he says. She lives in Delhi and he in New York after his well-publicised marriage with top model Priya Sachdev fell apart.

The other reason he’s here is to create a buzz around his Dream Dubai Marina Hotel which will open towards the end of next year. It will be managed by his father Sant Singh Chatwal’s Hampshire Hotels Management along with its global partner, Wyndham Hotel Group. This will be Chatwal’s 11th hotel. But then the Chatwals have always talked big. Last year in January, Chatwal Senior had announced that he will open 52 lifestyle hotels in various cities across India in the next five years. “And in 10 years’ time, we hope to have more than a hundred hotels in India,” he had told Business Standard. His son insists those projects are still on.

What is certain is that this Vikram Chatwal looks different from the one who accompanied his ambitious father last January. He has lost a good deal of weight since. “I have been playing tennis,” he says. But more than that, the devil-may-care attitude is missing. He appears focused and less distracted. Those who attended meetings with the father and son back in early 2012 recall how in the middle of a serious discussion, the junior Chatwal would suddenly get up and come up with something completely implausible and tangential, and how his father would signal him to sit down. “That seems to have changed,” says someone who has seen both these sides of him.

For Chatwal, it’s not been easy being his father’s son. “The first challenge was dealing with nepotism. People said I’m just my father’s son. So I had to prove that I could work independent of him,” says Chatwal. “I made my first million on my own.” Then there was the challenge of coming from a family with “a dominant and, on top of that, a successful father,” he says. “I also had a communication issue to resolve with my father because he was very much an Indian conservative man and I was becoming an American. I was growing up as an American.”  

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His journey from childhood, he says, has been about being able to adapt to his ever-changing environment. “I was born in Ethiopia, then lived in Montreal, grew up in New York and always kept coming back to India.” Change brought with it complications. He had to make space for himself in the West while maintaining his identity as a Sikh who wore a turban and sported a beard. Ask him if he also speaks Punjabi and he replies emphatically: “Bilkul (absolutely).” He recalls that when he was in school, he had to deal with the consequences of looking different. “There were incidents of bullying, yes,” he says. “I fought back. Sometimes if people are after you for certain reasons, then you can reason with them.”

Life, he says, has been a bit of a wild ride. That would be an understatement. He has hopped from one controversy to another. For about four years now, he has been in and out of rehab for drug and alcohol addiction. In April this year, he was arrested and charged with drug trafficking. Less than a month later, he was kicked out of a restaurant in one of his own hotels. He is said to have been involved with American actress Lindsay Lohan who has also had a drug-abuse problem and who was reportedly arrested at his Dream hotel last year. Known as the “Turban Cowboy” who wears his heart on his sleeve, three months ago he proposed marriage to Spanish model Esther Cañadas, only to call it off within weeks. In the past he has also dated supermodels Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen, going to the extent of getting a ‘G’ tattooed on his arm for ‘Gisele’. The relationship’s over but “the tattoo’s here,” he says. “It stands for ‘guru’ now or a ‘bad guy who does good things’. Make whatever sense of it — ‘guru’ or ‘gangster’.”

On a serious note, he adds, “I am not (all) about controversy. It’s unfortunate. Certain things that happened were not because of me. Sometimes they resulted because of other people. There have been things said about me that I didn’t like but I just move on.” The one person who keeps him going, he says, is his daughter. “She’s young but she’s wise enough to know when things aren’t going right. She’s only seven, but she can read the newspapers and then asks me questions.”

In comparison to him, his younger brother, Vivek, 39, prefers to keep a low profile, focusing on the less glamourous side of the business — finance. “He’s a bit more sensitive and more introverted. He’s just a very calm individual,” says Chatwal.

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Chatwal once said he wanted to be the world’s first billionaire Sikh. In 2002, that did happen. “We were worth $1.4 billion. Now it has gone down a bit,” he says. That’s because, he says, he wanted to do other things besides “the pursuit of money”. The “other things” included modelling and acting. He modelled for Vogue, Brooks Brothers and some others. Next came films like One Dollar Curry, Honeymoon Travels Pvt. Ltd, Ek Ajnabee, Zoolander and Confessions. In Honeymoon Travels, for which he won an award, he plays a closet NRI homosexual who is forced into marriage by his parents. It’s an intense role and he manages it well. In One Dollar Curry he proves that he can also pull off a comedy.  

Four other films, two from Bollywood, are in the making. He’s donning the producer’s hat for one but doesn’t want to reveal its name or who his costars would be. He’s more forthcoming about the Hollywood films, of which Soul, about child trafficking, will see him playing “a Sardarji police chief” and will also star Gillian Anderson of The X Files fame.

Politics is another area of interest. His father is visibly close to the Clintons, having heavily funded their election campaigns. Chatwal too wants to head in this direction. “I have my own relationship with the Clintons. I got Bill Clinton to come to India for the American India Foundation,” he says. He is active in the Democratic Party and, like his father, raises funds for it. “I’d like to see Hillary (Clinton) run for elections in 2016. That’ll be interesting,” he says. American politics has been a family interest for a long time. Now, Chatwal says, he wants to get involved with Indian politics. How? That he doesn’t know yet.