Business biography: The early days of Ravindra Kishore Sinha’s Security and Intelligence Services

After the success of Indian IT behemoth Infosys and American social media giant Facebook, and recent startups like Zomato and Ather, it has become a norm to celebrate businesses that started off from garages or modest one-room operations. The beginnings of SIS were similar.

In the first few years of its life, SIS’s address was 94, Patliputra, Patna. Officially, this was the residence of Ravindra Kishore. But for all practical purposes, it was also his office. He lived upstairs on the first floor with his family, including his parents. Downstairs were two rooms that became SIS’s office. If there were too many people to accommodate, the veranda would become the office’s extension. On the back there was a garage, which in later years would hold a kennel for dogs that were trained and deployed on customer sites.

On Sundays, 94, Patliputra would become a recruitment centre. The house had a lawn that would be filled with a steady stream of youngsters hoping to land a job. They would fill up their forms and wait for instructions from UN Singh, one of Ravindra Kishore’s earliest hires. On his instruction, the young men would stand in a queue and their height and weight would...

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