Imagine a circular community center with three storied red brick office blocks neatly splattered around its in-circle. Imagine shops of all sizes, rectangular, square and trapezoid. Think about car, scooter, cycle, rick-shaw and auto parking spaces within this space. A row of yellow leather by the roadside, a line of black rubber tires slotted on welded iron casings along the back lane, rectangular spaces enclosed on three sides with neat slanting strokes of white paint on the tarred roads.

Visualize neatly arranged shops selling house hold items, fruit juices, electrical goods, clothes, jewelery, medicine, cigarettes and music cassettes. Now conjure up an electronic mixer and place all the above imaginations in it as if they were ingredients to be mashed for an unknown recipe. Let the mixer whirl saturating the divisions of notions of spaces, goods, services, and practices with hues of market, law and practices. Conceive a boiling pot and mix the paste, put the lid back and let it ferment for some time.

It was eighteenth of June. I was standing on the steps of a community center, thinking that that this place seems to have seen better days.

Bathed in sweat, I strared at a tilted hoarding of Eagle Eyes Security Service agency just above the cobbler's spot on the sidewalk besides the Mother Dairy's booth. Upon asking, the cobbler directed me towards the third red brick building on the right. It's on the second floor, he said just go by the back door. The staircase from the front goes till first floor only.

Akhil Mishra and Nikhil Mishra were the owners of Eagle Eyes Security Service agency. The company’s logo had a profile sketch of a menacing eagle with an automatic klashnikov hung around its neck. The steps to the office went through a dark staircase, on the landing of the first floor I could see about two dozen civil service aspirants struggling to listen and take notes on Indian history, geography and philosophy even as they huddled in ten feet by eight feet rooms with bright tube lights glaring at them from three walls, and low hung fans trying to engage them with mock brawls against sweat and humidity.

The notice board on the right door at the next landing clearly indicated the office of the security service agency. I entered without knocking. The door opened to a small hall. A receptionist was sitting behind a desk towards the far end of the hall. There were three rooms adjacent to each other on my right. There was separate marking on the door of each room. Akhil Mishra MD, Nikhil Mishra CMD and storeroom. The office had fake wood paneled interiors and second hand furniture.

Nikhil Mishra was thirty-four, he came to Delhi twelve years ago to study for the civil service examination. His younger brother treaded in his footsteps two years later. Akhil realized quite early that he was not cut out for any civil service job; he took up a position of a security supervisor in a firm. For next two years while on job he learned the tricks of the security trade. And before the beginning of third year started his own firm, Nikhil Mishra joined the firm a year later, as CMD.

The firm concentrated its operations by providing security related services to industrial establishments, middle level factories and government offices. In nineteen nineties the government had abolished rules that compelled factories and other industrial production houses to source their security from the central industrial security force. Nikhil Mishra claimed that Eagle Eye was a direct beneficiary to this change. The reason was economic. An armed guard from Eagle Eye would cost five thousand rupees to a factory owner as opposed to nine thousand rupees he used to give earlier to CISF. More ever in case of any labor unrest, the CISF guard use to sympathize with the workers as being a permanent government employee he wasn’t scared of any retrenchment while a private security guard, asserts Nikhil, is more loyal than anyone else because the fate of his job is decided by the owner of the industrial house or the factory.

Eagle Eye employs eight hundred armed and unarmed guards. Their guards’ work on twelve-hour shifts on a twenty-four hour basis at locations splattered across the national capital region, and in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Typically guards are sourced from Darbhanga region of Jharkhand. Eligibility criteria for Eagle Eye, require a guard to be at least tenth pass, five feet and eight inches tall and below thirty-five years of age.

The company initiated a practice, to ward away an uncertainty regarding

tenure of employment and identity of person employed as a guard, that all the original certificates taken away and kept in a bank locker only to be returned when a person leaves the organization and gets a NOC signed by the accounts office of Eagle Eye and the HR manager of the firm that person was posted to.

Each armed guard got three thousand seven hundred rupees and an unarmed guard two thousand and five hundred rupees as salary.

Nikhil was quite upbeat about the future. He plans to broaden the operations to include south Indian states, incorporate electronic surveillance systems to enhance the services of the company and increase the intake of guards proportionately to meet the demands.