Dear Austin Tamil Sangam Community,
We are reaching out to you to clarify the series of events that caused much confusion among the community and to share an important decision.
Austin Tamil Sangam (ATS) was founded in 1991 with a core mission to promote interaction of Tamil community living in Austin and Central Texas, uphold its values and culture and to promote the awareness of the breadth, the depth and richness of various literatures in Tamil. It was established 27 years ago to serve the community.
Due to some internal conflicts, the past Board of Directors (BoD) and Executive Committee (EC) members decided to form an Advisory Council (AC) to help resolve the differences and form a new BoD and EC. The AC had discussions with past BoD and EC members, past Presidents and other community leaders. We found deep personal differences among the office bearers.
The AC formed a Transition Team of 3 members. Transition Team consolidated the IP and financial assets, solicited nominations and completed selection of new office bearers. In addition to forming a new team, the Transition Team wanted to make sure the past mistakes are not repeated again in the future and established strict terms of transition.
Unexpectedly, some of the new BoD and EC had a major conflict on the terms of transition the very next day after taking oath on August 19th 2018. Hence the transition team felt the need to reconstitute a new BoD and EC who pledged their full support for transition.
The Transition Team sincerely thanks Mr. Ashokkumar Subramanian, Mr. Mohan Karuppusamy, Mr. Thilip Kumar Thakku and Mr. Ganesan Elangovan for their unconditional support and having the willingness to step up and support the community. In hindsight, we realized mistakes have been committed by everyone including past and new BoD and EC and the Transition Team in some of the recent actions. Hence we are currently reinstating all the members of BoD and EC that was selected in the first place and took oath on August 19th 2018.
As a reminder, below are the individuals selected to lead ATS for the next term of 2018-2019 who took oath on August 19th 2018.
Board of Directors
Balaji Krishnan
Chidambaram Vairavan
Praveen Bhattar
Sakthivel Sabapathy
Shanmuga Sundaram
Executive Committee
President: Kaliaperumal Arumugam
Vice President: Sunder Ponnurangam
Secretary: Karthikeyan Annapillai
Treasurer: Hari Iyer
The Transition Team is thanking and requesting everyone to gracefully support the community’s interest to maintain peace and honor. It also requests Mr. Sundaresan to transfer the financial assets to Mr. Kaliaperumal Arumugam and register the original team back on Texas records. In addition, it is requesting Mr. Jey Iyempandi to handover all IP assets to the EC President, Mr. Kaliaperumal Arumugam to proceed with ATS functions.
The task of transition team has been completed and we are leaving behind a stronger and united ATS in good hands. As of today, the transition team is dissolved.
We thank you all for the passion for Tamil language and culture. We all should be very proud of our rich heritage and culture. We should strive to maintain harmony in all situations and respect each other to grow ATS. We wish the very best to the new BoD and EC for their service.
Sincerely,
Transition Team
Dr. Kanagasabapathi Sathasivan
Dr. Satish Thirumalai and
Mr. M.S. Sundaresan