His road to the RAC club has not been paved with gold. Vishnu’s come a long way from his birthplace in Berbice. Today, he is a well respected economist, writer and diplomat. Not in Guyana to his eternal grief. Yet he retains an affection for his mother’s land. That is shown by his frequent contributions to the national debate in the letter columns of this very newspaper. He is speaking from a position of some knowledge and experience. For twelve years he was the Director and head of the economics section of the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, then a Professor at UWI in Jamaica.

His start in the UK nearly five decades ago was somewhat more modest. His first job on landing in the colonial motherland in 1954 was, like that of so many other migrants, a menial one on the London Underground. He stopped reading timetables and started reading books. He studied hard in his own time, made it to the Queen’s University in Belfast and then to Reading University for a doctorate before that glittering career in the public service. Since leaving UWI he has not stopped, serving as an UN Consultant and the technical adviser to the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery under his old boss at the Commonwealth Secretariat, his fellow Guyanese Sir ‘Sonny’ Ramphal. He’s tried to serve Guyana too. One short spell as an economic adviser back in 1999 ended in tears.

He would still like to give. Pro bono.

Today he is wealthy. ‘Probably one of the wealthiest Guyanese in the UK’, he tells me. Vishnu may be an achiever but that is naught compared to his family. Son Raj is quite simply the best known psychiatrist in Britain. A broadcaster on both the BBC-domestic and world-and ITV, he is a widely published and popular author who has made a name and a fortune out of the secrets of the mind. Raj’s wealth shown by the fine Nash Terrace he and his wife own in a very chi chi London address-Regent’s Park NWI. Vishnu’s second son, Avinash, is equally rich but less high profile than the ‘People’s Psychiatrist’. A banker in the City of London with State Street Bank, Avi is a dollar millionaire earner. To honour his father, he has endowed a scholarship for West Indian students at the London School of Economics, his own alma mater. Vishnu’s wife Lakshmi is making a splash as an author. Her new novel is due out in the not too distant future. Breakfast time chez Persaud must have been a challenging experience!

On the very day that we were meeting in the rarefied air of St James, Professor Persaud was due to deliver the post opening feature address at the Wilton Park Conference on Guyana. That Foreign and Commonwealth Office sponsored experience was designed to get the warring tribes in Guyana away from base and conversing with each other rather than shouting. Whispers not megaphones. It was aborted much to Vishnu’s chagrin. His diagnosis at Wilton Park would have been clean and clinical. His prognosis for the country is grim. He says it is ‘a failing state’ but that passive might become an active unless the government does something, very soon, about economic growth.

In his view Guyana is stagnating. One to two percent growth based entirely on revenues from the extractive industries, revenues that will not continue forever and which, if not carefully invested in capital goods, will lead to economic doom. Go-Invest needs to live up to its name and not its local nickname of ‘No-Invest’. ‘It’s no good attracting fly-by-nighters and chicken farmers, Guyana needs real long term industries’ he tells me. But businessmen need stability to invest; to date that has been lacking in the country. It is long overdue.

In his view, Guyana and the Guyanese need to make imaginative economic and intellectual leaps. The latter he is not convinced is possible with the current human resource personnel available in the country. Hence, the need to call on some of the best brains in the diaspora. Including his. Like so many who have left, he wishes his native land well. He wants to help but on his own terms. In his considered view, no action now is not an option. Unless Guyana can pull itself up by the economic bootstraps, it is looking down the dark tunnel of migration and de-population as its people continue the flight north to the richer pastures of North America. Has Washington more Guyanese now than Wismar? Has New York more than New Amsterdam? How long before both are the case?

Over the cool glass of Sancerre and deftly fried calves’ liver, our conversation about our native land varied far and wide. It is somewhat ironic to be sitting in the belly of the British Establishment beast discussing a country four thousand miles away. But, as the Guyanese say, Vishnu still has at least some of his mother’s navel string left planted in Berbice soil. This man is a Guyanese of some style and much substance.