Samrat Cafe is a landmark for many in Hamirpur. On Sujanpur road its a small cafe with very few items on the menu card...Oh! it doesnt have a menu card actually...you just need to blurt your order.
This Cafe used to be a Hut in the middle of a garden at some time and interestingly this Hut had wheels under it...which gave us the sense that it could move. But over the years this Hut became a permament structure.
Its one of the open air cafes in the town and so you also get to smoke here. The seating are rickety iron benches and equally ricketty tables...but we used to love it during our college time.
It was the perfect place for us to gossip right from girls to politics and all those interesting times of college. Now the benches are replaced by a new bunch of youngsters.
Samrat Cafe has now become a beer bar and often frequented by people wanting to sip beer in the evening.
Just outside is a chowk...three roads meet at this place. It didnt have a name at some point but it has. Its now called Shaheed Captain Mridul Sharma Chowk. Incidentally Mridul was my college mate and we went on a tour to Rajasthan together. We used to call him Mamu.
Everytime I come home I look at his photo and remember him. Hamirpur is home to many officers and jawans of the Indian armed forces especially army. In fact I remember paying homage to a number of martyrs during the Kargil war. I was in college then...and every night the district headquarters used to recieve the bodies of soldiers from the war front.
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