'Banker to the poor'

Mohammad Yunus's felicitation by the Nobel Committee with this year's Nobel Peace Prize is a reminder of so many things at once. That there still is an ember of selflessness glowing somewhere out there, so things cannot be all bad. And a solid educational background needn't necessarily mean being closetted with thugs of books and mumbling incoherent nothings that one would be hard-pressed to seek the practical relevance of.

This Bangladesh national comes with impressive academic baggage: an Economics Ph.D under a scholarship, a tenure as faculty at Colorado University, and a stint at Chittagong University later. Following the debilitating war against Pakistan in 1971, he set to action during the famine that consumed the land, starting off by granting small loans from his own pocket to small-scale cottage industry workers who could boast little or no collateral to support normal loans from big-name banks. Of course, it was a risk, as such endeavours usually are, but it succeeded, built solely on faith and solidarity. All the borrowers made the payment back, he discovered.

His pioneering movement of microcredit has become world-renowned now(starting with his Grameen bank, the majority of the beneficiaries being women), pulling millions from destitution to self-sufficiency.

Humbling indeed..... This is the sort of stuff you would think had gone out of fashion: an individual with a solid social conscience and the brains to work on it, to carry it to fruition, sans the smug and fatalistic pontification most of us so gleefully indulge in. I cannot think of anything more richly rewarding than an effort drawing from basic human trust turning so productive.

Laud on the cliches, for once wholly deserved. Here is something to cheer about while corruption, terrorism, rampant social inequities and the like continue to darken the horizon....