Prof. Prodyut Das 2

  The Standard Hotel, Hazaribagh In the 1950s for those who did not work for the Government and thus could stay at the Government Circuit House when on a visit, the Standard Hotel was the go-to place in Hazaribagh. It stood on the Kutcherry Road with its back to the Bazaar and if you looked carefully at the sign board it was actually the New Standard Hotel the original having been left behind in, I think, Rawalpindi by its proprietors at the time of the partition. Why two brothers from distant Rawalpindi should end up in a town of thirty thousand people and forty miles away from the nearest railway station is a story I now wish I had heard. The Hotel stood on the main road and was faintly reminiscent of the hotels one saw in Western movies. One crossed a narrow verandah with wooden posts to a glass fronted Restaurant and to the left a thunderous flight of wooden steps led up to the rooms upstairs. I say thunderous because the steps had no carpet on them and that was exactly the noi