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Creativity, Passion and Big Bucks

SANTA CLARA

Murrali Rangarajan, president and CEO of Logistix, a fast-growing Silicon Valley company, and a charter member of TiE will lead a presentation/discussion on Sustaining Growth: The Rest of the Story. The event is scheduled for September 19, 1.30 pm to 4 pm.

Rangarajan says that passion is the most important quality for successful entrepreneurship. Logistix recently made four acquisitions, including Adatsa, a wholly owned IBM subsidiary in Mexico. It has also tied-up a strategic alliance with Repro-India, a supply chain management company in India and an authorized replicator of Microsoft products.

He calls Logistix "the virtual business operations and implementation machine", the one that handles the entire transaction from the order entry to shipping and customer service. The company has an electronic commerce infrastructure that ties the front-end to the back-end of a business seamlessly in a global framework. Logistix now employs 600 regular and 1,400 temporary workers at any given time around the world, has annual revenue of $ 600 million.

Rangarajan earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from IIT, Madras in 1975. He also holds a master's degree in industrial engineering from Arizona State University and an MBA in marketing and finance from UCLA.

Prior to joining Logistix, Rangarajan held several senior levels management positions with Digital Equipment Corp and Ford Motor Company. He has been an advisor to several start-up companies such as Netcustomer.com, Ecode.com and Asia-Links.com.

The event will be at Santa Clara Marriott Hotel, 2700 Mission College Blvd, Santa Clara.

Admission for members will cost $ 10 if paid by September 17, $ 15 if later. Non-members will pay $ 15 if paid by September 17, $ 20 if later.

RSVP by September 17; TiE phone: (408) 567- 0700 Fax : (408) 567- 0777; web site: http://www.tie.org.

Fund Raiser for Congressman Ackerman

ATLANTA

A fund-raiser for Gary Ackerman (Democrat, NY), the chairman, Congressional Caucus On India and Indian Americans, is slated for 7 pm on September 17 at the NW Atlanta Hilton on Windy Hill Road. Indian Americans active in the Republican and Democratic Party are joining hands for the $ 500 per person dinner event.

One of the staunchest and vocal allies India has in the United States, Ackerman leads the India Caucus in the House, and has persistently criticized Pakistan and China's policies.

Ackerman is presently serving his ninth term in the US House of Representatives the Fifth Congressional District of New York, encompassing the North Shore of Queens and Long Island, including Northeast Queens, Northern Nassau County and Northwestern Suffolk County.

A senior member of the House International Relations Committee, he continues to play major leadership roles in flashpoint areas of the world. Often, these involve national security, nuclear proliferation and terrorism issues in areas such as Israel and the Middle East, Northern Iceland and Latin America.

Ackerman, the ranking Democrat on the International Relations Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, is involved in US policy towards countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada. He is also a member and the most arecent Democrat to have chaired the Subcommittee on Asia which had jurisdiction over US policy toward countries in Asia.

In this capacity, he made history in October 1993 by traveling to North Korea to discuss with Kim II Sung, then the country's leader, the framework under which North Korea would agree to cease building nuclear weapons. Upon return to South Korea, Ackerman became the first person since the Korean War to cross the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).

In addition, the Clinton administration has consulted with Ackerman when formulating its trade policies toward many Asian nations, including China, Japan and Vietnam.

Ackerman also serves on Banking and Financial Services Committee where he sits on two subcommittees, Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit and Capital Markets, Securities and Government Sponsored Enterprises.

He is a champion of consumer rights and a fighter for financial community reform. The Banking Committee has jurisdiction over financial institutions, housing programs and monetary policy-issues that are critical for New York City and Long Island.

In January 1996, Ackerman ventured to India, enduring sub-freezing temperatures in an attempt to secure the release of western hostages in Kashmir.

Among Ackerman's most significant legislative accomplishments was the passage of his Baby AIDS legislation, which became law in May 1996. The measure requires mandatory HIV testing of newborns and disclosure of the results to the mother. It also forbids insurance companies from terminating the health insurance of anybody who undergoes an AIDS test, regardless of the results.

Ackerman championed the issue of newborn testing after discovering that 45 states (including New York) tested babies for HIV but did not disclose the results to the mothers, using the data for mere statistical purposes.

As a result, thousands of mothers brought their infants home from the hospital, never aware that their child was HIV-positive. This legislation, which became the subject of profound debate nationwide, garnered such support that it was the only bill that session of Congress to have a majority of all Democrats as well as all Republicans in the House as cosponsors.

Ackerman also stopped the anonymous testing from being reinstated in 1997.

He also helped to force the state of Hawaii to change its discriminatory law that forbid blind individuals from bringing their guide dogs with them to the island. He convinced the German government to establish a $ 110 million fund to compensate 18,000 Holocaust survivors and to investigate whether 3,300 Nazi soldiers collecting German pensions in the US are war criminals. He was also successful in getting Medicare to cover testing for prostate cancer.

Congressman Ackerman`s recent accomplishments in the Fifth Congressional District include helping local defense industries convert to peaceful applications in the post Cold War era. He also persuaded the National Cancer Institute to fund and undertake the nation's first ever study of environmental factors causing breast cancer. This study is taking place in Long Island where the rate of breast cancer is among the highest in the nation.

The venue is NW Atlanta Hilton, Windy Hill Road, Atlanta. Phone:(770)-953-9300 for contributions.

For more information, call Ani Agnihotri, (770) 840-1925, Krishna V Srinivasa, 443-4300.

If you would like to post any information about forthcoming events or community happenings, please email the details to bettypais@aol.com

Information and photographs can also be mailed to Betty Pais at 87-52 108th Street, 2nd Floor, Richmond Hill, NY 11418-2229, USA.

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