Only Kashmir News Desk
It was 2016 unrest in Kashmir, following the killing of young militant commander Burhan Wani, which triggered massive protests in the nook and corner of Valley, leaving dozens of youth dead and hundreds wounded facing the lethal weapon “Pellet Bullets.” Amid such a situation of distress and agony a 13-yrs-old boy from Duroo Sopore Kashmir, Wasif Rashid Bhat decided to live by the classic Wall Street belief—”Invest in Distress”.
Wasif started to put his techie talents to profit by investing in the digital market but by then the clouds of uncertainty had started hovering over the valley. The internet blockade barring broadband services hammered the augmenting Digital-Market of Kashmir. This teenager boomed on to own a Digital and IMEX marketing company and inscribed his name as ”Kashmir’s youngest entrepreneur”.
Time has changed and so has his lifestyle and status in society. He’s currently employing more than 80 people—an amalgam of school and college students and a few graduates—in his ”Your Dream” company.
Five years later, in the main town of Sopore, in a gleaming new building, that is mainly uninhabited, one office space is occupied by an enterprise called ”Your World”, a digital and network marketing company whose mission is to ”create an entrepreneurship infrastructure for a new progress movement of Kashmiri youth”.
”Entrepreneurship is not an elite endeavour,” he exclaims with a smile. ”Anyone, with good communication skills, a sharp mind and social awareness, can become an entrepreneur at any point of life.”
He was born in Sopore’s Duroo village to a well-to-do family of Abdul Rashid Bhat, a man who Wasif marks as his ideal and supporter. Growing up in a family of fruit merchants, the boy was grooming to be a self-starter.
”I knew I was going to be a businessman but it was clear enough that I wouldn’t be participating in my father’s domain,” Wasif says. ”My aim was simple — I had to do something else.”
Two years after his first IMEX venture, at 15, Wasif introduced many connections (both local and international) in 2018, that helped many young teenagers to understand the complexity of IMEX and Digital Marketing.
