Yesu Persaud was a friend for more than 50 years. He was always helpful, and thoughtful in his help and advice, to my wife and myself. My heart as well as my mind is full of what I could say about this man so widely and rightly praised as a great patriot who made numberless contributions to Guyana during a long and full life.
I pay my own respects and praise to Yesu by using my column this week to reproduce the Foreword I wrote for his book – Reaching For The Stars, the first volume of his memoirs. The second volume is still to be published.
Given the title of Yesu’s book, I find it very appropriate that that other great and reliable patriot, Joe Singh, tells me that in the Hinterland of Guyana when a revered shaman dies his “transition” is referred to as his journey through the Milky Way…
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I have known Yesu Persaud for 40 years. We emerged out of comprehensively different pasts – his ancestors indentured laboureurs 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.
Before going on there are two things which this Foreword enables me to do. One is to thank Yesu for his personal kindness to myself. He has been a good friend always – helpful in times of stress, supportive with good advice, warm in affection, looking for positive things on which to build. So it is that I thank him for his personal friendship as well as for his tremendous contribution in so many fields in Guyana.
And, secondly, how can I not take the opportunity to thank him most warmly – myself and thousands of others – for his and his inspired team’s creation of the best rums in the world. (“In moderation, Ian, in moderation,” I hear him say). What an achievement these splendid rums are! I have often said that there are at least three perfect things I have experienced – one is the beauty of the great Essequibo River, the second is Rohan Kanhai’s cover drive and third is El Dorado 15 Year Old Rum!
Here 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 benefitted 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 left his mark on our history.
This is a life which has been, and continues to be, 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 has led from the start. I have seen Yesu operate close up as he has built IPED into a wonderfully successful Guyanese institution. Four aspects of Yesu’s work at IPED illustrate the nature of what he has achieved in a larger context.
IPED has been an outstanding success. Yesu has built this organisation 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 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 I think 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.
So now I urge you to read about how it all started and with what drive and tenacity and intelligence and concern for his loved ones and goodwill to all Yesu slowly but surely built a life and a career which has grown into one of Guyana’s great stories. This book is the first part of Yesu’s story of his life. It takes the story only about halfway but it contains incidents, experiences, crises and triumphs quite enough to fill the entire lives of most men ten times over.
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 still 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 businesses and participating in the drama of the Booker nationalization. This is a remarkable and uplifting story in its own right – and remember we are just half way.
But entwined throughout this story is another narrative. It is the wonderfully vivid and honest account of Yesu’s private life within the family circle 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 to 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.
