Indian Writing

Professor Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank that he started in 1976 in Bangladesh have together been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006. This 1995 Atlantic article describes how it began:

One afternoon in 1976 Muhammad Yunus was taking a walk in a village a mile from Chittagong University, where he was the head of the Department of Economics, when he encountered a woman weaving bamboo stools.

Yunus had returned to Bangladesh in 1972, after the country had become independent. Prior to that he had spent seven years in Nashville, Tennessee, completing a Ph.D. at Vanderbilt University. Yunus had been influenced by the student activism of the late 1960s, especially the civil-rights movement, and the message he carried home was that it was possible for young people to change society. As a professor of economics in Bangladesh, he asked his students if, for all their knowledge of equations and formulas, they really knew how 90 percent of the people in their country lived. He challenged them to close their textbooks and get involved with local villagers, and for four years he spent his afternoons with them in villages, studying the informal economy, organizing immunization programs, and helping local farmers to grow more food.

Yunus had never met Sufiya Khatun on his many walks through her village. Sufiya, a widow, was trying to support herself by constructing and selling bamboo stools. She earned two cents a day. When Yunus asked why her profit was so low, she explained that the only person who would lend her money to buy bamboo was the trader who bought her final product—and the price he set barely covered her costs.

Yunus’s instinct was to dig into his pocket. But first he wanted to see if there were other villagers in similar circumstances. He and a few students canvassed the village and compiled a list of forty-two people whose capital requirements, in order to buy materials and work freely, added up to about $26.00…

What a great effort for change.

Picture via.

What lovely news. A new bird species discovered in India after half a century. The Bugun Liocichla. There’s hope for the planet yet, it seems.

Here’s a short story that I read some time ago: Ben Fountain’s “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera”.

No way Blair insisted to anyone who asked, no self-respecting bunch of extortionist rebels would ever want to kidnap him. He was the poorest of the poor, poorer even than the hardscrabble campesinos pounding the mountains into dead slag heaps—John Blair, graduate assistant slave and aspiring Ph.D, whose idea of big money was a twenty-dollar bill. In case of trouble he had letters of introduction from Duke University, the Humboldt Institute, and the Instituto Geográpica in Bogotá, whose director was known to have contacts in the Movimiento Unido de Revolucionarios de Colombia, the MURC, which controlled unconscionable swaths of the southwest cordilleras. For three weeks Blair would hike through the remnant cloud forest, then go back to Duke and scratch together enough grants to spend the following year in the Huila district, where he would study the effects of habitat fragmentation on rare local species of parrotlets.

It could be done; it would be done; it had to be done. Even before he’d first published in a peer-reviewed journal—at age seventeen, in Auk, “Field Notes on the Breeding and Diet of the Tovi Parakeet”—Blair had known his was likely the last generation that would witness scores of these species in the wild, which fueled a core urgency in his boyhood passion—obsession, his bewildered parents would have said—for anything avian.