Olly enjoys some music

The Resort Hoka is now ‘The Hoka Island Villa’. It’s official and final now. Kind of long and quite a mouthful some would say! But it is done and it’s got a story to it.

I know that more than a few of us are going to miss the old name, A lot of us, including myself, I expect, would continue to call it ‘The Hoka’ as we did before. Incidentally the new abbreviation spells ‘Thiv’, which when said out loud, rhymes with ‘Div’, the local & original name of Diu. But this wasn’t planned it just happened!

The web address will remain as before; www.resorthoka.com/.  The decision to retain the original web name was taken by Ram, a regular guest & a friend, and now ‘Chief’ of the Hoka IT division, de jure & de facto. He put his foot down on this… but that’s another story for later.

The hotel is named after the Hoka tree (Genus: Hyphaene species: H. Thebaica). This African branching palm, with various theories about how it found its way to Diu and flourished, is now endemic to the Island . Way back in 1992, trying to figure out a name for our hotel, Sangeeta Singh, a dear friend from Delhi, helped by posing this question: “is there any plant or animal that’s special to that area…??”.  And so, the name ‘Hoka’ was chosen.  I am sure that Sangeeta doesn’t remember her connection to the name, as then the ‘Hoka’ was just a distant dream of mine!

People come into our hotel asking for a ‘Hook-kaah’.  That chilled out smoking device. And they are a little confused, amused or sometimes disappointed when on asking for one; find us pointing at the trees around or being handed a hard red and fibrous Hoka fruit.  ‘Hoka’ incidentally also means ‘crazy’ or ‘mad’ in the local village parlance. People say “Hoka thaeee-ga-ya”, meaning, in Gujarati, she or he has gone mad! Also for quite some time people thought it was a family name and I was introduced as Mr. Hoka on a few occasions.  Well that’s fine, because we have definitely done some crazy stuff at the Hoka and taken some perfectly mad financial decisions; but it definitely is the tree we are named after.

And then the word ‘Resort’ was affixed to ‘Hoka’ as the whole idea of the venture was to make a place which was peaceful, relaxed, and friendly, warm, personal and interesting.  An English lady wrote years ago in a note to us “ Four days at the Hoka was like being at the Betty Ford clinic”. We checked out later what Betty’s place was about and were glad. We were also a whole lot cheaper.  Those years the price was Rs. 400 per night. But her note, among other warm notes from other guests, encouraged us to stay the course during tough times.

Finally, the reason the ‘The’ was added to the name as well, was quite honestly, because it seemed the ‘in’ thing to do those days. Yes people thought that that gave your name class, more substance and a certain style! But mainly, to me it also made the name a little longer, a mouthful and a bit of a tongue twister. A hallmark of all our names. Our restaurant has recently been re-named ‘Cat’s Eye View’. No the idea wasn’t to be different but to have fun and enjoy the names! And if that makes us different, that’s cool too.

However to come back to the name change… as time passed and business grew, a need was felt to remove the word ‘Resort’ from the name. And the primary reason was that though our guests were mostly happy, however not surprisingly quite a few expressed reservations or disappointment over the fact that the ‘Resort Hoka’ was not the large property that they imagined it to be. And considering that they had a point, since the hotel industry norm tends to connote the term ‘resort’ with a large property, duly offering various service and recreational facilities and since we, in the initial years did not offer even television and hot water was by the bucket and since it was difficult to explain to the world that “NO NO, even a small and simple place can be a ‘resort’…” and since it was far easier and cheaper to change the name than.. ..  to increase the size of the property, to buy another acre or two of prime (read ‘unaffordable     ]..commercial land, and since we never wanted ‘The’ Hoka to be a typical large hotel, wherein it would lose its personal touch and since we did not want our new customers to feel as if they had been shortchanged on account of a ‘misleading’ name and …and so we decided to drop the word ‘Resort’.

We were, (and still are) looking to take our guests on a boat ride and not on a cruise. So it is apt that we call our boat a boat and not a ‘Cruise liner’!  There is a different fun, tranquility and pleasure in sailing a boat as compare to that of sailing on a ship. “A boat ride allows us to explore the intimate nooks and crannies of the coast, to traverse the shallows, and to drop our anchor whenever the fancy takes us – outside the deep and busy waters of the shipping lanes”.  These are Edward Simpson’s words beautifully conveying our thoughts and the Hoka idea.

The other reason has been the inflexion point in the change in our surroundings. New buildings around necessitated the construction of a high compound wall around our property. This led to a major shift in our design concept for the Hoka. Whereas before it was an attempt to maintain a harmony with the natural surroundings, it now became an overriding endeavour to retain the ‘warm’ and ‘little oasis’ quality that the Hoka was & meant to us, our regular guests and those new clientele who were on the lookout for such spaces. To me, The Hoka quite often nowadays, feels like an island within an island. Trying to keep its character and stay above the rising waters of seemingly mindless change around.

And today, about 14 years later, the building asks for repair & renovation and there is scope for refining the spaces within the hotel and the rooms; however, despite these changes, we hope that ‘The Hoka’ has managed to and will continue to preserve its core qualities. And these are the qualities, of being genuine, simple and honest, which though the hardest to achieve and keep, but to us the essence of a good place to stay. …and the essence of a good Life itself.

‘THE HOKA ISLAND VILLA’,

Yours truly,

Aditya Dogra.