Lim Cheong Keat, Buckminister Fuller and Rabindranath Tagore

A few weeks ago, sometime around Valentine's day 2009 I interviewed Datuk Lim Chong Keat, renowned architect and botanist and a friend of Buckminister Fuller at a leadership retreat for future leaders. Lim, a polymath and a visionary like his friend "Bucky", read out "Bucky's" last inscription for him on Valantine's day 1983. Lim gifted me a copy of the inscription. Buckminister Fuller wrote:

"Human INTEGRITY is the uncompromising courage of self determining whether or not to take initiatives, support or cooperate with others in accord with all the truth and nothing but the truth' as it is conceived by the divine mind always desirable in each individual.

Whether humanity is to continue and comprehensivly prosper on Spaceship Earth depends entirely on the integrity of the human individuals and not the political and economic systems.

The cosmic question has been asked-

ARE HUMANS A WORTHWHILE TO UNIVERSE INVENTION?"

Ninety years before this event, Rabindranath Tagore, another lover of humanity, and his father left Calcutta on Valantine's day to tour India for several months, visiting his father's Santiniketan estate and Amritsar before reaching the Himalayan hill station of Dalhousie. There, Tagore read biographies, studied history, astronomy, modern science, and Sanskrit, and examined the classical poetry of Kālidāsa.

Tagore wrote a beautiful vision for humans, the pursuit of which makes them worthwhile to universe invention.

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

Wish every child in school would sing this in school assembly every morning, like the National Anthem, every day! Maybe that will help us to rise to the integrity "Bucky" asks of us to realize this vision. Datuk Lim knows how in his lovely woods of Bellevue in Penang.