By M. Burhanuddin Qasmi
Haji Ajmal Ali was born in a marginal farmer family of Haji Abdul Majid in 1923. It was in the 1950s that Haji Ajmal Ali ventured into a new world, far from his native place, Assam, and started selling agar wood to a friend in Mumbai, who used it to make perfume. Soon, he joined his friend and set up his first shop-- Al-Hafiz Traders at Nagdevi Street, across Mumbai's famous Muhammad Ali Road and Crawford Market. There has been no looking back since that early beginning.
The 85-year-old Haji Ajmal Ali, whose five sons expanded his original business in herbal perfumes into a global network with over 500 outlets, hails from a small hamlet near Hojai in Nagaon district of central Assam. They now commute between Mumbai, Dubai, Jeddah and Hojai, where the Ajmals have their regional business headquarters.
Today, Ajmal is a well-established business house with thousands of people working in factories and showrooms in India and abroad. The second generation of Ajmals have leveraged their business strengths and expanded into other businesses such as garments, lather goods, cosmetics and real-estate. But business has been just one part of Haji Ajmal Ali’s life. He has used his business acumen for a leavening social vision that embraces the marginalized and deprived in a charitable dispensation toward a commodious social responsibility.
Haji Ajmal Ali was born in a marginal farmer family of Haji Abdul Majid in 1923. It was in the 1950s that Haji Ajmal Ali ventured into a new world, far from his native place, Assam, and started selling agar wood to a friend in Mumbai, who used it to make perfume. Soon, he joined his friend and set up his first shop-- Al-Hafiz Traders at Nagdevi Street, across Mumbai's famous Muhammad Ali Road and Crawford Market. There has been no looking back since that early beginning.
The 85-year-old Haji Ajmal Ali, whose five sons expanded his original business in herbal perfumes into a global network with over 500 outlets, hails from a small hamlet near Hojai in Nagaon district of central Assam. They now commute between Mumbai, Dubai, Jeddah and Hojai, where the Ajmals have their regional business headquarters.
Today, Ajmal is a well-established business house with thousands of people working in factories and showrooms in India and abroad. The second generation of Ajmals have leveraged their business strengths and expanded into other businesses such as garments, lather goods, cosmetics and real-estate. But business has been just one part of Haji Ajmal Ali’s life. He has used his business acumen for a leavening social vision that embraces the marginalized and deprived in a charitable dispensation toward a commodious social responsibility.
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