The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering held a dinner to celebrate Professor Emeritus Lee Seng lip’s 90th Birthday on Friday 20 March 2015. Professor Lee a former Head of Department is recognised as an outstanding engineering leader whose lifetime accomplishments and achievements have made profound impact in the engineering industry, academia and community. He has brought national and international honours to Singapore and was awarded the Lifetime Engineering Achievement Award in 2013.
The dinner held in the Tudor Ballroom of the Goodwood Park Hotel. The hotel is where Professor Lee has been living for the past 25 years and more! The dinner was also an opportunity for friends and fellow alumni, students and past and current faculty to come together to honour Professor Lee’s 40 years with NUS.
An exciting program was lined up, including a sumptuous nine-course banquet with traditional birthday buns, to make this occasion more memorable and enjoyable. Dinner guests also wrote down their best wishes and special memories in a special guest book presented to Professor Lee at the end of the dinner.
One hundred and ninety three guests signed up for the dinner which provided an opportunity to catch up with friends, staff and alumni. Many are now doing well in various professions in both the public and private sectors. The dinner ended with the cake cutting ceremony.
Birthday Toast delivered by Dr ONG Khim Chye Gary at a dinner organised to celebrate Emeritus Professor Lee Seng Lip’s 90th birthday held at the Goodwood Park Hotel on Friday 20 March 2015.
Professor Lee Seng Lip, honoured guests, friends and colleagues, ladies and gentlemen.
On behalf of the organizing committee let me welcome you to tonight’s dinner. It is indeed a great pleasure to have so many of you here to join in the celebrations tonight.
This Dinner was planned as an occasion to celebrate Professor Lee Seng Lip’s 90th birthday and for friends and fellow alumni, students and past and current faculty to come together to honour Professor Lee’s 40 years with NUS.
Tonight we shall have the opportunity to re-visit some of the good old times we shared together and also enjoy ourselves with some fun. We have a guestbook for you to sign and write down your special memories about Prof Lee.
There is no doubt that Prof Lee is a visionary, well ahead of his time, with deep insights of a nation’s need for infrastructural development. He has acknowledged significant contributions to the infrastructural development of Singapore, and in achieving first-world city status. We can readily recall numerous iconic projects, like Changi Airport’s second runway, land reclamation projects off the East Coast, Punggol and Tuas, etc. He also contributed his innovative and creative solutions, further afield in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. For his contributions in civil engineering education, research and development, and professional practice, he has received numerous honours and awards. More of that later.
We begin tonight’s formal programme with the Birthday Toast. But before that I propose we start by talking about age, jokes, friends and longevity.
Professor Lee would remember Jack Benny the comedian. Jack Benny said: “Age is a question of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.” This joke was cracked by me at a two-day symposium held in Prof Lee’s honour on 21 to 22 March 2011 at this very same hotel! Incidentally all the guests tonight will be presented with a CD of the symposium proceedings. For the birthday toast tonight, I found another of Jack Benny’s joke very suitable for the occasion.
“Give me golf clubs, fresh air and a beautiful partner, and you can keep the clubs and the fresh air.”
We move on to the topic of “Friends”. “Friends are the family you choose.”
“It is a good thing to be rich and a good thing to be strong but it is a better thing to be beloved by many friends” as said by Oliver Wendel Holmes.
Next “Longevity”. Today we live in extraordinary times. Thanks to medical and scientific advances that even a generation ago would have sounded like science fiction, our lives are getting longer. The figures show that the average life span of a person born today is a full 20 years longer than one born in 1925. We as a society are growing old. For the first time in American history the number of people over 60 has exceeded those under age 15. Singapore is not that far behind!
Today what we have is that the culture that guides us today – when to get an education, marry, have children, buy a house, work, retire, is I think profoundly mismatched to the length of our lives today. For me it is about diseases that may afflict me as I age and how to finance my decades-long retirement. There are many advice available from a new group of experts called longevity gurus. But such experts has been around a long time.
Sound advice from Mark Twain. “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like and do what you’d rather not.”
Plenty of research shows that strong social connections and friendships are equally important factors in healthy aging. It is not just about how long we live but also how well. It is not about extending life indefinitely but rather extending a healthy life for a bit longer.
We all need to arrive at old age, mentally sharp, physically fit and financially secure. Professor Lee managed all three with resounding success.
I would like to give a toast Professor Lee Seng Lip. Please be upstanding, and raise your glass in toast to our very own Professor Lee Seng Lip – the birthday boy.
To Jokes: “You don’t stop laughing when you grow old. You grow old when you stop laughing.”
To Friendship: “There are good ships and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the seas, but the best ships are friendships, May they always be.”
To Health: “May you live as long as you like and have all you like as long as you live.”
Thank you everybody.
