"When everything was in the doldrums, it was quite risky," Riyaz admits. "But I had faith in the forward-looking youth of Kashmir."
There were teething troubles, but he managed to set up the cybercafé in the upmarket Maulana Azad Road area with seven computers.
"By the grace of god, today I have 85 computers and the place is still growing. Mine is the largest Internet café in the entire state and surfers have taken to my place like ducks take to water," he says.
Ninety per cent of his customers are between 20 and 40 years old. "It is the youth mostly who use my café for Internet surfing, chatting, e-mailing, Net telephony etc. We charge just 50 paisa per minute and the facility comes handy not only for hundreds of local youth, businessmen, professionals and journalists, but also for the foreign tourists who come here," he says.
Riyaz's café also generated jobs for the local youngsters. He has over a dozen employees who supervise the café's functioning.
Besides running the café, Riyaz provides Internet access to many local residents through a cable network spread throughout the posh Residency Road area of the city.
"I have been doing most of my business networking through the Internet. It has really made life easy for me," says Gowhar Maqbool, 43, a local businessman.
Riyaz started with a dial-up connection, which was quite "costly for me and my clients. But, I wanted to cultivate the Internet habit among the locals. Today I have unlimited access through the local software technology park. We will soon provide broadband facility to our clients. The Internet is growing very fast in Kashmir," Riyaz says.
Following a Dukhtaran-e-Milat -- a separatist women's group -- campaign against obscenity, Riyaz had to remove the cabins inside his cybercafé. Interestingly, the local police took up the campaign started by the separatist outfit.
The cops ordered all hotel and cybercafé owners to remove cabins inside their establishments within a fortnight.
Riyaz has nothing against such campaigns.
"I have removed all the cabin doors, but that has not affected my business at all. I get the same number of clients each day. In fact, the number of clients has increased," he says.
"It [the Internet] is both learning and earning. Life is a lot better after I started downloading valuable professional information from the Internet," says Dr Mubasir, 43, a physician.
"In my profession, you have to remain updated; otherwise you become outdated," he adds.
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