The Namesakes

If you stop by at Haveli,a 23-acre food plaza on the Delhi-Amritsar stretch of GT Road,you will find a very worried looking Satish Jain.

If you stop by at Haveli,a 23-acre food plaza on the Delhi-Amritsar stretch of GT Road,you will find a very worried looking Satish Jain. He is the owner of the restaurant that has been voted Indias Best Highway Eatery by myriad surveys. Thats the worry,he says. His restaurant,on the outskirts of Jalandhar,is so popular that there are now Havelis in Karnal,Ambala,Ludhiana and Mohaliand none of them is his. My brand is being destroyed, he says.

We are now opening a new restaurant on GT Road in Sonepat and people ask me why am I opening one in Sonepat when I already have a complex in Karnal. I am tired of explaining that I dont have any other restaurant apart from this one in Jalandhar, says Jain.

Like Jain,Ashok Mittal gets upset every time a Lovely Sweets gets inaugurated at a street corner in Punjab. Mittal,whose family-owned Lovely Sweets became so popular that the family diversified into various businesses including auto dealerships and now a private university with a huge campus,says people identify his Lovely Sweets brand with quality but now the counterfeits are ruining it all. The name is everything. When we started Lovely University,a lot of people told me that it was a weird name for a university. So when we initially put out advertisements,we tried some other names. But the response was poor. Later we put out advertisements calling it Lovely University,and the response was stupendous. Thats our brand equity, he says.

Right outside Ambala bus stand,there are eight eateries,all standing cheek by jowl,each proclaiming to be Puran Singh Ka Asli Dhaba. The real Puran Singh started with a small shack outside the bus stand way back in 1958. The business thrived and he opened a restaurant,but after his death,a lot of restaurants came up,each claiming to be the original. Every afternoon during lunch time,there are scuffles between the armies of scullions posted outside these restaurants as they frenetically try to convince drivers to stop by at the original Puran Singh dhaba.

Some of them are now taking legal recourse against the fakes. Havelis Jain says he has filed for registration of the name but the process is taking an inordinately long time. Kulcha Land,in Amritsar,has gone to the extent of filing a patent for what it claims is its unique recipe of kulchas.

They can certainly file for registration. The formal issue of a registered name can be time consuming. But if they are miffed over some one misusing their name and concept,they can still go to court, says Shantanu Puri,a corporate lawyer based in the region.

Filing a suit is cumbersome,says Jain. It has been seven years since I applied for a registration of my trademark. But nothing happened. I will now make sure our forthcoming restaurant in Sonepat is so unique that nobody will be able to emulate it, he says.