I did not go to Kumarakom to learn about leadership.
I went as a young hospitality professional, posted to a property at the edge of a backwater in Kerala, in a fishing village where tourism was still finding its footing and the rhythms of life had not changed much in generations. The men fished through the night. The mornings belonged to the bar or to sleep. The women held everything together in the silence between. The canals wound through thirteen acres of green.
I did not know it then, but Kumarakom was going to give me the most important education of my career. Not in a classroom. Not through a course or a conference. Through four people, each of whom taught me a different dimension of the same lesson:
That the only leadership skill that ultimately matters is the decision to see people — fully, specifically, and without waiting for them to earn it.
These are their stories.
Sunil
The man behind the loudest voice
Every property has one. The union member whose protest is loudest, whose grievance is most ready, whose presence at the front of any demonstration is so reliable it has become a kind of institutional fixture. Sunil was ours. Hardened by the conviction — not unreasonable, given the history of many such relationships — that the hotel group hadarrived in Kumarakom to extract what it could and leave. Every negotiation was a battle. Every new policy was a provocation.
I learned his name.
That was all, at first. I simply made it my business to know that the man at the front of the crowd was named Sunil. And the next time there was a protest — his voice rising above the others, his placard held highest — I called out to him by name.
He stopped.
Not because I had said anything clever. Not because I had offered anything or threatened anything or deployed any tactic from any management manual. I had simply demonstrated, in two syllables, that he was not a category to me. He was Sunil. A specific man, whose name I had considered worth knowing.
The name is the first investment. It costs nothing. And it says everything about whether you see a person or a problem.
I was staying in Kottayam at the time, driving to Kumarakom each morning. Occasionally I would see Sunil walking — a long walk in the Kerala heat. I stopped the car and offered him a ride. He agreed with the wariness of a man who has learned that gestures from management come with hidden clauses. But there were no hidden clauses.
In those car journeys, with no agenda and no audience, I discovered something the protest placard had entirely concealed: Sunil was a gifted artist. I told him so. I encouraged him to pursue billboard artistry as a livelihood rather than a pastime.
He left the hotel eventually. Left the protests, left the union, left the role of institutional adversary that had become, over years, a kind of identity. He became a billboard artist. Built a life from it.
I did not rescue Sunil. I simply stopped the car. The rest was already in him, waiting for someone to notice it was there.
Raju
The host who did not know he was one
Raju’s story follows a shape that many fishing communities would recognise. He fished through the night — skilled at it, familiar with every current and channel in the Kumarakom backwaters. And then, as morning light came across the water, he would make his way to the bar. The earnings from the catch dissolved there, reliably, before they could reach his family. His health had begun to follow. The fishing trips were becoming less frequent, less productive.
What was not visible — what I do not think Raju could see from inside it — was something he possessed entirely apart from fishing. He had a country boat and an intimate, unhurried knowledge of the meandering canals. He knew where they widened, where the light fell in the late afternoon, where the birds came to feed and when. And when he was sober, he was a man of natural courtesy — warm, genuinely attentive, unhurried.
I encouraged him to keep the boat clean. To take guests on village canal cruises.
Raju turned out to be extraordinary at it. He would stop the cruise at the right moment, unannounced, produce fresh tender coconuts, and offer the cool water to guests with the unhurried grace of someone who had been hosting people his whole life without knowing that was the name for what he was doing.
You cannot install warmth. You can only find the person in whom it already lives, and give it a stage.
The guests loved him. He became, within a season, the most sought-after guide on the property. His lifestyle changed. His relationship with his family changed. The bar still existed, but it no longer held the same claim on him. He had somewhere to be. Someone to be.
I was happy. That is not a small thing to be able to say about a decision you made as a manager.
Thangachen
The invisible man who changed everything by being seen
Of all the people Kumarakom gave me, Thangachen is the one I think about most when I reflect on what leadership actually requires of us.
His job was to clear the canals. Thirteen acres of backwater property, and someone had to keep the weeds from reclaiming it. That someone was Thangachen. He came quietly. He worked without complaint, without performance, without the need for anyone to notice. When the clock reached five in the afternoon he went home. He never shirked, nevernegotiated effort, never required management to stand over him.
He was, in the language organisations rarely use for the people who most deserve it, exemplary.
I had been watching. Not because there was a problem — Thangachen never created problems — but because I had made it my practice to follow the work across the property. And what I noticed was a man of complete self-motivation, working in total obscurity, doing something essential that nobody was acknowledging.
I decided he needed to be recognised. I called his name at the next town hall meeting, in front of his colleagues, and acknowledged his work.
Thangachen did not know what to do with this. The slight bewilderment of a man who had spent so long being invisible that visibility felt unfamiliar. He was happy, clearly. But also genuinely at a loss.
The person doing everything right with no audience is the most important person in the room. And the most starved of acknowledgement.
I also learned that he had a son — unemployed, capable, looking for a foothold. I offered the son a position in the horticulture department.
Years later, I was told that Thangachen had forbidden his son from joining the union.
Not because he had been instructed to. Not because there was a policy against it. But because of what the organisation had done for his family. Because a manager had watched him clear weeds on thirteen acres and thought: this man deserves to be seen. Because a name had been called at a town hall and a son had been given a chance and a life had been made a little more secure.
Loyalty of that depth — the kind that passes from father to son — cannot be manufactured. It is the slow accumulation of being treated as a person rather than a resource, witnessed over years.
The Women of Kumarakom
The transformation that moved me to tears
Kumarakom in those years had a rhythm that the women did not choose and could not easily escape. Their husbands fished through the night. The earnings met the bar before they met the household. The women managed the children, the home, the quiet arithmetic of making too little stretch far enough. Their contribution was total and their recognition was almost nothing.
We decided to change that. Horticulture. The kitchen. Local cuisine, prepared by women who had been cooking it their whole lives and had never once been paid for the knowledge.
They came tentatively at first. A door that opens for the first time is also a door that could close. But the welcome was real. And once they knew it, they thrived.
When you give a person economic dignity, you do not change what they are capable of. You remove the weight that was preventing them from showing you.
One by one, they became earning members of their families. The shift in their bearing — the directness that replaced the tentativeness — was not subtle. It was the visible change that comes when a person discovers that the world has a use for what they can do.
Years later, I returned to Kumarakom with my family. They came running. Not with the careful courtesy of former employees greeting a manager. With joy. They knew my children’s names. They asked after them by name.
I had learned Sunil’s name in a crowd and it had quietened a protest. They had learned my children’s names across a decade, and it moved me, standing there by the backwaters of Kumarakom, almost to tears.
What you give comes back. Not as transaction. Not as repayment. As love.
What the Village Taught Me
I have spent four decades in hospitality leadership. I have read the literature and attended the seminars. And I can tell you, with the clarity that only lived experience eventually produces, that none of it comes close to what four people in a fishing village in Kerala taught me about what leadership actually is.
It is not strategy. It is not systems. It is not even vision, though vision matters.
It is attention. Specific, sustained, unhurried attention to the individual human being in front of you — not the role they occupy, not the problem they represent. The person. Always the person first.
Leadership is not about what you build. It is about who you see — and what becomes possible for them because you did.
Sunil needed someone to stop the car. Raju needed someone to hand him a stage. Thangachen needed someone to call his name in a room. The women of Kumarakom needed someone to open a door and mean it.
None of this required budget approval or strategic planning. It required only the decision — taken quietly, without announcement, repeated daily — to look at the people around you and ask not what they can do for the organisation, but what the organisation might do for them.
That is what Kumarakom taught me.
I am still learning it.
Epilogue
It has been a long time since I left Kumarakom.
Those were impressionable years. I have forgotten some of the names — but I will never forget the faces. And those eyes. The way they looked when something good happened unexpectedly — not expressive in any dramatic way, but carrying something in them that I recognised as trust.
After work, walking amongst them, I was no longer a threat. There was a sense of camaraderie that needed no announcement. It simply prevailed.
It felt nice.
I am not sure there is a more honest way to say it than that. After everything — the strategy and the decisions and the years — what I carry from Kumarakom is not an achievement. It is a feeling. The feeling of having been trusted by people who had every reason not to, and having tried, in my own imperfect way, to be worthy of it.
That is what I would wish for every leader. Not the title or the track record. But that evening feeling — of walking amongst people who have decided that you are safe. That you are, in some way that your designation cannot reach, one of them.
Once you have felt it, you understand what you were always really building.
Who is the person in your organisation you have been looking past?
