He has been branded everything from brash to brilliant, from arrogant to amazing, from driven to dynamic, but the fact is that Ani Agnihotri is very much the happening man in Atlanta in the new millennium.
“I think he has become more understanding and mature,” says wife Kiran. “His greatest quality is that he never gives up. He is very stubborn, but he has channeled it towards making things happen.”
“I am not a ‘yes’ man,” admits Ani. “That is why I didn’t join the armed forces, even though my family is predominantly from the Indian Air force and my father would have been thrilled. I am not cut out to play up to the army bosses as is the tradition.” Ani Agnihotri grew up in Bhilai, where his father worked. Both of his parents appreciated sports and social work, and Ani credits his mother for being the greatest inspiration for his involvement in community work. Despite being raised in an environment where academics were high in priority, Ani started playing table tennis approximately at the age of 10. A couple of years later, he found himself playing at the state level. “Until I reached my second year of college, sports remained my priority. I was a good student, but a better sportsman.”
Despite being a national level player and traveling all over, Ani soon realized that besides cricket and lawn tennis, no other sport in India was lucrative enough for a person to make it his or her profession. Thus, he earned a degree in agricultural engineering, and while preparing for the competitive exams, worked in sales for Godrej and later at a bank. After a friend of his at Kansas State University painted a rosy picture of going to school in the United States, Ani packed his bags and began his pursuit of an MBA.
“It was a major culture shock. My friend was doing PhD in Chemical engineering. I was there for an MBA. He was a top tier student. I was somewhere in the middle. I had only $5,000 that I had managed to accumulate for the trip after selling everything. They were spent in a few months. Then I wasn’t used to the style of education. It is totally objective. I missed the point totally and flunked my first quiz. There went my dreams of being a 4.0 student!” Ani’s professor was gracious enough to let him retake the quiz. Then came the dorm experience. “I think I was around thirty when I showed up in the United States for studies. I had eight years of a corporate career behind me, and it was a major come down from chauffeur driven cars to cooking three times a day and sharing a dorm room with a Japanese guy who wanted to call his mother and girlfriend in the middle of the night, yelling in Japanese while I wanted to study hard!”
As the money ran out, Ani started the next round of roughing it out. “I started working in the kitchen, cleaning yards, and realized there was no way I could continue my education without a scholarship.” In the meantime he was advised to contact universities that were offering sports scholarships. Time was running out, but he finally made it to Augusta State University, a school that boasted a very strong table tennis (or ping pong, as it is known here) team.
“It was touch and go. I did not know until the last day if I would get the scholarship,” laughs Ani. “I had already decided, well if I have to go back home to India, I might as well go in style. I’ll just blow up whatever money I have left on a cruise. Might as well see the world.” Once the scholarship was awarded, things sort of settled down financially. “I was sharing this two-bedroom house, which was over 50 years old, with five to six people including one girl. Sometimes the electricity would not work for an hour, or a tree would fall on the house. It was a zoo in there.”
Ani had been seeing Kiran for a while, and her parents were not quite excited. They really had no clue about what their future son-in-law was doing. Ani decided to go back once the scholarship money was in, married Kiran, and brought her back. By then, he had moved into an apartment. “It was a bare bones one,” Kiran recalls. “I was in the travel industry and had been abroad. I was very impressed by these lovely student apartments I saw in Germany. They were gorgeous. Here I found myself in this little place with barely any amenities. We had no car for a while and had to walk everywhere, but I was happy to be married to him, and now we look back at those days with fondness.”
While in Augusta Ani got heavily involved in the Indian American Cultural Association’s Augusta activities and made contacts that would later stand him in good stead. “It is a fact that unless you are from one of the top 5-6 schools, even after an MBA, its tough to find a job,” recalls Ani. He was going to graduate in December, and with the birth of his daughter set for January 1, he had only a month to find a job in the US or return to India. Fortunately, he was afforded an opportunity in Atlanta through someone he had met at the IACA. Later, he joined Softpros Inc, Chand Akkineni’s company. While in Atlanta, he again got involved with the IACA. “IACA had given me so much in return that I wanted to give back to the community,” recalls Ani. He started by serving as joint secretary on the team of the late Purna Gunjapalli, IACA president elected in the mid 1990s. It was only in the late 1990s that Ani came into prominence as IACA president and got into hot water with a lot of the old timers.
“IACA is a voluntary organization, and I believe strongly that I don’t belong to any clique. I also believe that we must have a strong umbrella organization that is recognized by both the Indian dignitaries as well as the Georgia government. For that to be accomplished IACA has to be run professionally. I believe in planned projects and executing them to achieve solid results.”
“We tried to make IACA a more professional organization and ended up offending some old timers who did not like the changes. In the old days when some of them put their foot down and said ‘No this is not to be done, or cannot be done,’ the IACA board would give in. In our case we asked, ‘Why can’t it be done?’ and that ruffled some feathers. I am normally patient and try my best to convince people.
The Festival of India, the Gandhi Awareness Week, the installation of the statues of Mahatma and Kasturba Gandhi at Morehouse College, and the India Center projects are things Ani is very proud of accomplishing during his stint as IACA president. “It was a lot of hard work, but it paid off. This year we had over 8,000 people at the festival of India for example. I only hope that they will also continue to realize the dream of the India Center. We need it for our future generations. We must learn from the Jewish and Japanese communities and the way they recovered from the Holocaust and the Pearl Harbor attack to emerge stronger than ever, instead of pulling each other down.”
Another feather in Ani’s cap is the stupendous success of GIACC (Georgia India America Chamber of Commerce), a non-profit organization started by him and his colleagues to further Indo-US trade ties. “I realized what a strong need we had for an organization like this while I was president of IACA. The embassy officials would call saying so and so minister is visiting and we would scramble around trying to make arrangements. Or someone going to India needed information from anything to everything. Initially even I wasn’t sure how this whole thing would work out, but with encouragement from Counsel General Wangde we did finally work towards the inception of GIACC. It was formally launched in September last year. We have had a steady increase in membership, though we have not yet managed to receive the patronage of big corporate houses like Coco Cola for example. We are told they normally wait and watch, but we are very proud of our affiliations with top Georgia schools. We will be taking a delegation to India soon. We have an Indian film festival in the works, and have hosted many dignitaries as well as many important seminars and events. I think the atmosphere is just right to further US-Indo ties, and I hope to continue to be a part of GIACC and its growth.”
When asked what else is in the works, Kiran responds, “I wish we could get a break after each big event. Sometimes it’s tough trying to juggle the budget at home and the budget at the IACA! But, he loves what he is doing and has so many ideas for the future.”
“Well, I think the Indian community is growing by leaps and bounds,” says Ani, “I want them to be more politically aware. I plan to get involved in American politics down the road. I also need to find time to unwind. I have always loved dancing and languages, and I want to take time out to learn both.”