Still an optimist, still trying to change the world

BENGALURU: A meeting is ending at the Jacaranda conference room in the ITC Gardenia hotel. There’s a murmur of voices. The language being spoken is English, but the accents are a mix of French and Bengali. And as each of the attendees leaves the room, he or she pauses, takes a moment to go to the back of the room, to say their goodbyes to a short grey-haired man in a Nehru jacket at the back of the room.

The man is Muhammad Yunus, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, for his “or their efforts to create economic and social development from below”. Yunus has been in Bengaluru for the past week, for the Eighth Social Business Day, an event which took place over Thursday and Friday at the Infosys Campus in Electronic City, and featured speakers and panelists from all over the world.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time in Paris,” says Yunus. “I’ve just come from there, and will be returning there soon,” he says. Yunus has been working with Anne Hidalgo, the Mayor of Paris, and one of the key areas of their collaboration is the 2024 Paris Olympics. Hidalgo, Tony Estanguet, the

Paris2024

Organising Committee chief, and others have partnered with Yunus to “create a bridge between the world’s greatest sporting event, to be staged in France in 2024, and the emerging world of social entrepreneurship and the circular economy throughout Greater Paris”.

Hosting the Olympics is seldom a profitable proposition for the host country. The 2012 London Olympics saw an inflow of $5.2 billion on an expenditure of $18 billion. Vancouver brought in $2.8 billion, after spending $7.6 billion on the Winter Games in 2010. And Beijing generated $3.6 billion and spent more than $40 billion for the Summer Olympics in 2008. Most Olympics-related jobs go to already employed workers, and do not help the unemployed.

“Preparing for the Olympics, you build housing for 15,000 people – for 15 days. You build these beautiful houses, world class living spaces. Before the Olympics, there’s a lot of fanfare , there are ministers, there are spectators and sports superstars. But after the 15 days, they’re abandoned,” says Yunus. “The housing areas are auctioned off, and rich people buy them.”

“And I have to ask ‘Why? Why did you do it?’ Why don’t you build the Olympic village for your city, and not for visitors? Build it for the homeless people, design it around them. Make it a real village, with shopping centres and schools. Let the stadiums become children’s playgrounds after the event. Let the swimming pools become community spaces,” he asks, his animation rising with each sentence.

“Then you have the catering, the maintenance contracts and all that. Big companies bid for – and get these contracts and they make a lot of money. So why not train the locals instead? Train them so that it will become a sustainable source of income for them even after the Olympics are over? The Olympic village now becomes an integral part of the city, a place where people can live and work and raise families and become entrepreneurs. Let the athletes be guests at this village, and treat them like honoured guests. But the village should belong to the city’s people. And that way, you change the city itself,” he says.

It sounds optimistic, and Yunus is aware of it. But, the French are serious, he says.The mayor of Paris is the force behind this initiative. She has declared Paris the global capital of social business. ‘This is our ambition, this is what we want to make of our city,’ she told me. She also invited me there, made me a honorary citizen, gave a beautiful historical building and said ‘You set up your Yunus centre here, and you work out of here.’ Even president Macron is behind the initiative. It is challenging work, which is why I spend so much time there,” he says.

Yunus is something of a celebrity these days, but his origins were middle-class. The son of a jeweller, he was born on June 28, 1940, one day after Hitler completed the conquest of France. An avid boy scout, he travelled to India and Pakistan (West Pakistan in those days). He then enrolled in the University of Dhaka, and completed his MA in Economics in 1961.

When Yunus was 25, he was offered a Fulbright scholarship - allowing him to pursue higher studies in the US. He completed his Economics PhD in 1971, and returned to

Bangladesh

, his new native country, after the war. After a brief stint as a member of the government’s Planning Commission, he returned to Chittagong University, as the head of its economics department.

Then, in 1974, came one of the worst famines that Bangladesh had ever seen.

“That was the turning point for me, something beyond my worst nightmares” says Yunus. “I saw corpses of people outside the University classrooms, dead from starvation. People were dying in the streets. And what good was all my learning to me? What good were all those beautiful theories, those elegant economic models, all those things that I was so proud of having learnt? They were all nothing. I knew nothing,” he says, staring into space as he goes back through time.

“It was a bad time for me. I realized I had wasted most of my life. I was seriously depressed for a while. Then, I decided to do something, however small it was. I thought let me atleast try to help one person,” he says.

Yunus then started going to the villages around the university. “It was then that I found out about loan sharking. It didn’t matter that there was a disastrous famine going on, people were behaving in a horrible way. The loan amounts were tiny - Rs 50, Rs 100, but then, these were used to take away everything from people who already had so little. Then I thought, why don’t I lend these people the money myself? I was just back from the US, and I had some money saved up. And since the amounts were so small, it didn’t affect me,” he says.

He soon established himself as an alternative lender. While Yunus’ loans made him popular with the villagers, the moneylenders weren’t happy. But there were no overt threats or violence. “See, most of these people went around as though they were very religious. Bangladesh is a Muslim country. And Islam condemns usury. So instead, they started a whisper campaign. They said that I was an agent of the church. I had come from America, and the money I was loaning out was to convert people to Christianity, they said,” he says. “It became very popular, and over time, I thought, why don’t I create a bank for poor people. And finally after a journey which began in 1976, with my own money, we started the (Grameen) Bank, in 1983,” he says.

The success story of the Grameen Bank is well known, as are the setbacks that Yunus has faced and the pressures he has had from the Bangladesh government. But when asked about this dichotomy, of being celebrated abroad and being under siege at home, he starts to answer, then decides against it. “The best thing for me would be not to talk about such things,” he says with a smile. But the smile is sad.

Muhammad Yunus,

Nobel Laureate

, talks about how he got started into microcredit – and explains why his vision for the Olympics keeps him returning to the city of Paris