Silver Jubilee celebrations of ATA (American Telugu Association) will be held from July 1st to July 3rd at Donald E. Stephens Convention Center, Chicago. ATA has invited a number of celebrities to the event. Some celebrities such as Anchor Anasuya and social media star Sampoornesh Babu have tweeted that they are not attending this event. Further, they blamed Mr Sree Raj Chennupati, a person who ATA denied is not associated with the organization. The actor and Mr. Chennupati washed their dirty lenin in the public. Ramesh Garapaty, cultural chair of ATA, swiftly responded and distanced themselves from the controversy. However, it turns out to be not true.
On further investigation, ATA has enlisted the services of Mr. Chennupati to facilitate the celebrity invitations and travel arrangements from India. In this video,at a ATA fund raiser event recently,we can see that actress Pranitha is thanking Mr. Chennupati for his help co-ordinating the event in front of ATA leadership team. (“I’d like to thank Sree Raj gaaru for arranging this”, Pranitha says). While there are clear evidences that Mr. Chennupati is closely working with ATA team , ATA cannot shy away from responsibility when a controversy arises. It would have been prudent for ATA to come out and openly apologize to celebrities for unprofessional behavior of one of its event partners, instead of shirking responsibility.Telugu conference organizers have to be more responsible when dealing with celebrities; Otherwise incidents like these are bound to happen.
As per T360 sources, a number of celebrities haven’t yet confirmed their visit to event, which is just a week away at the time of writing this article. ATA’s website (www.ataconference.org) still has only the list of “invitees” and not confirmed guests. This is becoming a standard practice across many Telugu organizations to falsely advertise unconfirmed celebrity guests to sell more tickets. In fact, even after Anchor Anasuya has categorically stated that she is not going to attend this event,the ATA website still claims “Dance performance by Anasuya” at the time of writing this article. Telugu community organizations are a WIN-WIN for all parties if properly planned and conducted professionally.
