Celebrating Yunus, celebrating all of Bengal

The individuals who have defaulted on repayment of loans borrowed from the nationalized banks move around with not a bit of shame about their criminality; and hoodlums who have entered parliament as lawmakers even as they have systematically broken every bit of the law, and sometimes the bones of the good and the innocent, hover even now in and around the neighbourhoods of those that wait for good and firm leadership to pull these satanic men up in the interest of justice.

Such is the macabre light of medievalism in which the Nobel for Peace has come to Professor Yunus. No, the Nobel is not a magic wand that will alter the course of life for us. But, then again, life is much more than the simplistic affair we often make it out to be. It is in the depths of gloom that life takes on fresh new meaning, a meaning which Muhammad Yunus has now given us through leading us by the hand, as it were, to a new respectability in the global community.

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Just as we were beginning to think we had actually hit rock bottom, his Nobel comes to us as a reminder that the Bengali, much like the phoenix, has it in him to rise from the ashes. All of a sudden, Yunus's achievement has pushed bad politics into the corner where it should forever belong, and has rekindled in us thoughts of the way we once were, and could be again.

It is a purely Bengali achievement, this Nobel Prize for Peace. At the same time, it is a reflection of the Bengali's inextricable links with modernity. The Bengali does not remain a Bengali if he cannot relate to, and interact with, the world outside his frontiers. The nationalism that has driven the Bengali people in their political and cultural movements in the past has, from such a perspective, been an all-embracing affair rather than the narrowness modern nationalisms are generally characteristic of.

Bengali nationalism -- and it is much broader than what you and I can conceive of -- is fundamentally a taking into account of the varied roles Bengali men and women of substance have played throughout the course of modern history on both sides of Bengal as we once knew it.

Muhammad Yunus is, thus, a re-energising of the essential, indivisible Bengali soul. He inherits the mantle that was once Rabindranath Tagore's, that has been in the hands of the urbane Amartya Sen. All three men -- Tagore, Sen, and Yunus -- have revitalized the Bengali spirit through bringing the Nobel home, in such diverse fields as literature, economics and peace, and have collectively provided a roundness to the political and social character of the race they have sprung from.

It is then right and proper that in celebrating Muhammad Yunus, we observe the evolution of our cultural history as it has shaped itself, or been shaped, over the decades. In this age of decadence, Yunus's Nobel informs us that it is yet possible to dream of things that are to be. That dream has flowed down to us through the clear stream of reason that Tagore once spoke of, a basis of belief in which we have our ancestors communing with us from across the divide of the years.

Count among those ancestors such illustrious men as Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das, Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. These are men who have defined, and then redefined, our modern sensibilities through times of the deepest despair. It is out of the dark that luminous men arise to offer chinks of hope to forlorn nations. The darkness in Bengal has from the point of view of history been thick, almost cadaverous, needing to be sliced through with a knife. We have had these Big Men in our lives cut a swathe through the dark; and once they passed on, we have slid back into the dark, into newer forms of it.

Professor Yunus knows all about this darkness, as do the rest of us. Where he has made a difference is in instilling the belief in us that hope truly springs eternal, that aspirations must begin with the basics. It is always a little village called Jobra that can reach out to the world beyond its fields of paddy, beyond paths strewn with dust in the manner of old.

Expand your thoughts somewhat, and what you then have is the clear understanding that all politics begins and ends with whether or not you can help change the life of the one who has nothing. You can give a man fish to eat. That is charity. But charity is not progress. When you teach a man how to fish, you realize you have taken the first step towards progress. And then? You take the man to a pond, tell him he has a stake in it, watch the way he smiles in disbelief. You know then you have helped a dream sprout somewhere in his soul.

It was just such a dream that Muhammad Yunus planted through Grameen. Poverty, he reasoned and we believed him, might be alleviated through an adoption of master plans and conventional strategy. The bigger thought was that poverty, because it was local, because bureaucracy was simply not equipped to deal with it, could be struck a blow at the micro level. The Nobel this year vindicates Yunus, and so rejuvenates us as a community. That the Bengali is yet capable of doing the good and of climbing the peaks, despite the overweening presence of mediocre and often malignant political leadership, is a truism that has been proved once again.

The Nobel that has come to Yunus humbles all Bengalis. It reinforces the old belief in them about the values they have, across the ages, held dear in all the myriad fields their great men and women have lived and worked in. Satyajit Ray will be, for as long as we hold on to history, a defining point of reference for us. Zahir Raihan made our films empower our politics with a new voice.

In Buddhadev Bose and Nazrul and Shamsur Rahman, we once spotted the sparks of poetry that took us into the far reaches of intellectual space. Jamini Roy and Zainul Abedin spoke to us of the magic of colours and the majesty of imagination. These are men who have stayed home, have kept coming back to their roots, to prove to us over and over again that patriotism is a whole lot more than a frothy screaming of chauvinistic slogans. Patriotism is, in the end, a silent dedication to an attainment of objectives that resonate with nobility.

The grit and determination which the men of Mujibnagar demonstrated in their twilight struggle for a free Bangladesh, the efficiency with which Jyoti Basu and Buddhadeb Bhattacharya have for three decades presided over the fortunes of West Bengal are for Bengalis on both sides of the frontier, and through its lengthening diaspora a heritage deep-rooted and so immutable.

That, briefly, is the tradition along which you can place the individual talent which is Muhammad Yunus's today. His courage was in engaging in the struggle to lift the poor out of their misery in a moment of uncertainty not many would share with him. But courage must come with conviction, which element has lain aplenty in Muhammad Yunus. The two elements have most wondrously combined to produce the sense of fulfillment, both Yunus's and ours, that now is the Nobel for Peace.

Muhammad Yunus's triumph may not reform the agenda of the nation's political warriors. But it can, and perhaps will, serve notice to them that the times, as well as the country, are passing them by.

As they quibble about power and pelf and play petulant about political dialogue, Yunus points ahead and shows us a beautiful, hugely more purposeful world beyond the narrow parameters of our debilitating parochialism. The gods have thus promised a renewal of spring for Bengalis, in this land and elsewhere. The moon will shimmer once more in the still waters of our timeless pastoral pond.

Syed Badrul Ahsan is Executive Editor, Dhaka Courier.