Official review by Indo-American News
“Read Underdog Thinking for the Thriller of a Lifetime”
By Pramod Kulkarni
Published on May 22, 2020
During these days of Coronavirus isolation, I have a lot of time on my hands. But that feeling is deceptive. As a corollary of Murphy’s Law, a lot of time on hand is countered by an equal amount of lethargy. As a result, it took me a long time to open this book.
Once I did open up Atul Vir’s book, Underdog thinking, I was intrigued by the first sentence: “When the third bullet whizzed by my office window, I knew the time had come.” This sentence refers to Atul Vir’s first job in Africa as a Country Manager for a London-based import/export company after graduating from The Lawrence School, a military boarding academy in Lovedale in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu, and then earning BCom and MCom degrees and Chartered Accounting certification.
Autobiographical in nature, the book describes how Atul, with his wife Arti and baby daughter, left everything behind in Africa and sought a new beginning in the United States in 1991. After a brief stop in New York, Vir selected Houston as an entrepreneur.
The book then describes Vir’s remarkable adventure as the entrepreneur who manufactured and sold a clothes washer/dryer combo unit. In the 1990s, the product was new to the United States. Vir and his company, Equator Advanced Appliances Inc., took the lead in creating a niche market for the combo unit as a compact appliance for apartments, trailer homes, RVs and marine vessels.
I was hooked into Vir’s book once he started describing Equator’s steep ascent and then, as rapid a descent due to a series of unfortunate crises with product quality control and breaches of trust. You’ll have to read the emotionally gripping finale of whether or not Vir is able to recover from the business debacles.
What was most interesting to me was to realize how trust played a key role in Vir’s rise as well as his downfall. Trust from various individuals such as an office manager, warehouse lessee, and an appliance dealer were the key factors that helped Vir establish his Equator brand.
Later on, breach of trust on the part of his manufacturer, legal team, and even real estate developers within the Houston community, led to the downfall of Vir’s company. Throughout the ups and downs, belief in his abilities as an entrepreneur provided the key survival instinct.
The book also contains 101 “lessons learned” and golden words of advice for achieving balanced business management. Do take up Underdog Thinking. It is a real-life thriller that rivals anything else in Amazon books.