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Everyone's caught in the Net in this Rajasthan town
Published on Tue, Sep 11, 2007 at 08:32, Updated at Wed, Sep 12, 2007 in 
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INDIA'S CYBER VILLAGES: In most small towns, people are first introduced to the Internet by the cyber cafe owner.
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Alwar: Alwar in Rajasthan is a picture perfect Indian small town. But in the middle of the decade-old market, is a recent obsession - the cyber cafe.
Pushpendra Singh started Alwar’s first cyber cafe, Om Cyber Zone, at a time when Internet was a vague phenomenon.
"When you run a shop, customer satisfaction is very important,” says Singh.
But everything in the café is behind closed doors. Cyber cafes in these towns are small spaces, but Internet users still insist on their privacy. There are 12 cyber cafes in Alwar and each one of them has cubicles.
And inside the cafes, users play games, shop online, job hunt, and chat. But it's the inevitable and illegal porn surfing that most cyber cafe owners are wary of.
But the benefits of Internet access far outweigh the slight hitches. Silak Deswal, from Rohtak turned his photocopying shop into a cyber cafe three years ago. People, who have never touched a keyboard before, come to Deswal’s Apna Internet Cafe for checking results, booking train tickets, or simply learning how to create an email id.
"Whenever there is a new technology, it's usually available only to the upper class. But this, everyone can use it. Like the cell phone, it becomes a necessity. I tell people to learn the Internet. Then definitely there'll be progress,” says Deswal.
In a way, Deswal and other cyber cafe owners are small town India's Internet missionaries - spreading the message, and letting the virtual world touch and improve real lives.
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Every new form of media gains its initial popularity by selling porn. Believe it or not, this was even true
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