Extraordinary People - Yesu Persaud

I have in mind compiling a book of brief pen portraits of Extraordinary People I have been fortunate to know in my long life – at least, a selected number of them since , to tell the truth, if you know anyone well enough and long enough everyone is remarkable!

One of the Extraordinary People is certainly Yesu Persaud, the second volume of whose memoir, “Reaching For The Stars”, was launched recently to well-deserved praise.

My column this week is an edited version of the Foreward I wrote for the first volume of “Reaching For The Stars.”

I have known Yesu Persaud for 40 years. We emerged out of comprehensively different pasts - his ancestors indentured labourers from India, mine top Colonial civil servants from England and France; his childhood in a sugar estate logie in British Guiana, mine in privileged homes in Trinidad and Antigua - to become long-term colleagues and firm friends. Thus does the wheel of history spin the lives of men willy-nilly into each other’s paths. I admire Yesu greatly and this excellent and enthralling memoir of his life has strengthened that admiration.

In this memoir is a vivid and fascinating telling of the story of the origins and progress of an astonishing life of ceaseless endeavour and a remarkable career of multiple achievements. Untold numbers of Guyanese have benefited from the businesses and institutions built by Yesu and the indefatigable public services he has undertaken. The fate of a country is set on iron rails one way or another by implacable forces. Very few men or women live lives that bend the arc of history even slightly. In a lifetime of aiming at excellence and striving for the betterment of his fellow citizens Yesu is one of those rare persons who has changed things very much for the better in Guyana and has left his mark on our history.

This is a life which has been extraordinarily full and active and a career replete with widely varied achievements in any number of fields including business, banking, enterprise development, public service and philanthropy. I have said, and repeat it here, that Yesu may well be the most respected man in Guyana today. His energy in good causes and the integrity of his life and work shines like a beacon. He is the perfect example of what a good citizen should be.

Let me display one relatively small part of his work to illustrate Yesu’s qualities both as a businessman and good citizen. For a long time I have served on the Board of IPED, the Institute of Private Enterprise Development, which Yesu founded decades ago and which he led from the start. I saw Yesu operate close up as he built IPED into a wonderfully successful Guyanese institution. Four aspects of Yesu’s work at IPED illustrate the nature of what he achieved in a larger context.

IPED has been an outstanding success. Yesu has built this organization into a billion dollar, well-run, internationally praised institution. His credentials as an energetic, successful, innovative businessman and entrepreneur are clearly displayed.

His integrity in this enterprise - as in all his work - is legendary. His reputation for fair dealing in a well disciplined organisation has been one of its great strengths.

The work he has done in IPED is selfless. As in so much else that he does Yesu works for IPED pro bono. He has built this enterprise for the good of the country, a national service. He does not get and does not expect compensation or showy gratitude. “That would be like the eye expecting a reward for seeing” as Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations. That is Yesu’s approach. He is a committed patriot par excellence.

IPED’s operations benefit the small men and women in society, those who have very little but are searching for a way to start in business, those too poor to be a good credit risk, those on the sidelines and even pretty near the gutter. IPED is for those in need who want to better themselves. Yesu can be rightfully proud of what he has achieved in IPED.

So in that one small part of Yesu’s endeavours you have a good portrait of the man a great and successful businessman and entrepreneur, a man whose integrity is unquestioned, selfless service for the good of the country, and concern and care for the less considered in our society in a very practical way.

An important part of this volume is an account from the humblest beginnings of Yesu’s steps up his career ladder from early school days to first most menial of jobs ever upwards to more demanding but lowly employment to the odyssey of furthering his education and extending his work experience in England to what turned out very quickly to be a triumphant return to Guyana where his employment soon attained levels inconceivable at the time he left to go abroad and culminated in his zoom to the top in the Demerara Group of Companies and taking a leading role in Guyana’s sugar and rum in the drama of the Booker nationalisation.

Entwined through this story is another narrative. It is the wonderfully vivid and honest account of Yesu’s private life within the family circle and among his relatives and friends. We read in straightforward and intimate detail - his remembering of events and impressions deep in the past is nothing short of extraordinary how he felt about and related to the people close him. The incidents and the characters and Yesu himself in the telling spring to life off the page. There are agonizing episodes - the death of Yesu’s young brother, the desperately distressing sickness of his wife that are harrowing to read and others in which honest intimacy comes across almost as a shock. But in the telling the tone and substance of complete authenticity is never missing.

I found this memoir utterly compelling. You can sense a beating heart, not only a calculating mind. The combination of recording the progress in an astonishingly successful, logie to penthouse, career and narrating with absolute honesty the journey of a flesh and blood human being makes this book quite exceptional.

And, let me recall, there is a second volume still to read.