My brush with celebrity

Today I had the privilege to listen to and meet one of the greatest entrepreneurs that ever walked the earth: Dr. Muhammad Yunus. Also called the banker to the poor, he is the one who developed the concepts of micro-credit and micro-finance. The concept is so simple, only a genius could have come up with it.

Most of his customers? Illiterate women, eager to start a small village enterprise, who a traditional bank would not even look at because they are too risky. His system of 'micro-credit' helped millions pull themselves out of poverty and is now copied all around the world. This is the most lethal weapon of mass destruction in the fight against poverty.

His Grameen bank now assists about 8.3 million poor and what is great about it, all borrowers also become shareholders of the bank. When Dr Yunus was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, the bank randomly picked one of its  borrowers to represent it in Oslo.

With his credentials and recognition one would think that Dr Yunus would be a hero in his country. Well, logic does not always apply in the Desh.

The Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, unleashed a political vendetta against Dr. Yunus. She labeled Yunus as a “blood sucker of poor people” and her propaganda machine worked overtime to remove Yunus from Grameen and break the bank in small pieces. Why would Hasina go after the Father of Microcredit? Well, because, in 2007, Yunus criticized Hasina (accusing her of corruption) and flirted with politics by briefly trying to create a political party.

In my humble opinion, the day Dr. Yunus will lose this battle, there will no longer be any hope left in Bangladesh. Maybe Tagore was right after all when he wrote:

“It is a great sorrow to be born as a Bengali.”