History finally came calling this week for Muhammad Yunus, often mooted as the sage, seasoned technocrat that Bangladesh needed, after the toppling of the country’s autocratic leader and his personal nemesis Sheikh Hasina.
Hours after Hasina fled to India to escape mobs marching on her house, student leaders of the “Monsoon Revolution” demanded parliament be dissolved and the octogenarian Nobel Peace Prize winner Yunus installed to head an interim government.
By Thursday Yunus, clad in a simple kurta and vest, had flown from Paris, where he launched a social entrepreneurship venture with the mayor and had a square named after him, to Dhaka, where the institutions of the old regime — police, judiciary, government — were melting away.