Met Col [retd] Vivek Mehrotra at Nehru Place. He runs a firm with Sundeep Dhaliwal. They started the firm in 1991. Dhaliwal and Mehrotra were childhood friends. They went to the same school and later to the same college. At twenty one years of age they parted ways. Mehrotra went to the Indian Defense Academy at Dehradun, while Dhaliwal joined a MBA institute in Delhi. Mehrotra specialized in communications systems and Dhaliwal did major in sales. Years later, when Mehrotra decided to take premature retirement from the armed forces, Dhaliwal, who had acquired a name for himself selling tractors to farmers in Punjab, convinced Mehrotra to start a business enterprise in partnership. Thus Security mart came into being.

I was on the eighth floor of an office building at Nehru place. The long corridor was vacant and dark. The notice board hung on the opposite wall to the elevator door showed the office of Security Mart. It was on the far right of the long corridor. I walked down the dim lit corridor past a old boys association of some school, a construction consortium office, and an interior design studio. I knocked twice before opening the glass-paneled door. A bell rang as I opened the door. Inside the office was divided into three rooms. On the left of the door, was a kitchen. I could hear a water tap being shut and some clutter of utensils. A wood paneled room with glass walls was on the right, a middle aged man was talking urgently to someone on the phone while cross checking something on a lap top and some sheaf of papers. Right in front of the main door were two cubicles, a bespectacled man was working on a laptop, and the other cubicle was empty. The walls of the cubicle were adorned with newspaper clippings about defense budgets of India and Pakistan. I hesitantly knocked again. Col. Mehrotra craned his neck over the edge of the cubicle smiled and motioned me to sit.

The logic was simple, Mehrotra, would bring his expertise in sophisticated defense communications technology, knowledge of tracking and surveillance systems, networks of ex defense personnel, while Dhaliwal would sell the wares, network with bureaucrats, persuade politicians and liaison with French, American and Israeli firms on behalf of the government. It was a smart combination of jargon and the works, of an idea and the deed.

Mehrotra refused to speak to me. He said, while rocking on his swivel chair, ‘see, we don’t deal with low end technology at all, CCTV, motion detectors, heat sensors are kid stuff, we deal with the real things. Since they are of sensitive nature, involves the government of India and can constitute a threat to national security, if we talk to any outsider, hence…’.

The Col. gave me a long hard stare when I got curious about a brochure of a product claiming to offer some solutions in the telecommunications sector. I bid him good by and left.