Mahathir was a gifted statesman and a prodigious visionary. His faith in science and modernity was unshakable. What many Arab Sheikhs could not achieve with oil revenues, he accomplished those with vision and strategy as his disposable tools. He supplanted agriculture with industrialisation, implanted toleration in a multi-ethnic society, and, merged the nation with a regional growth wave that brought miracles to East Asian economies in the 1990s.

He was not a leader by birth, rather one who lurched himself out from a modest background of a practicing physician. But he possessed strong hunches and focused on what was realistically achievable. Thriving toward stability through modernity and emancipation, he at times sacrificed political expediencies to economic necessities. Malaysia thus emerged as the vanguard of the most prosperous and peaceful of the South East Asian nations and catapulted its status as the hub of Asian investment and tourism.

He also fused Islam with modernity to carve out a unique, independent path of development. Women in Malaysia don Islamic garb, but they are also among the most educated and enlightened ones in Asia Pacific. By devoting in human development and technological innovations, Mahathir made the utmost out of individuals' skill and potential; adding sound meanings to the lives of the ordinary. His growth revolution changed the lives of millions of downtrodden, vertically and horizontally.

Mahathir and Malaysia are almost synonymous. So successful were his policies that the once agrarian British colonial hinterland is now a paradise of growth due to his manoeuvring away from the orbit of fundamentalism that was about to engulf his country.

He also extinguished centrifugal passions of minorities; built an armed force capable of facing geopolitical challenges from within and without; and left alight a beacon of hope to other leaders of the region. Our leaders should take the cue and learn from his legacy.