Broadly speaking there are two attitudes to death, one stemming from a belief in divinely ordained plan of the universe. This understanding of the working of this universe according to a divine plan generates a stoic attitude towards life and death and one is supposed to be unruffled by the heart -breaking events in the world especially by the death of dear ones But even Iqbal acknowledges that the very remembrance of the face of his mother brings uncontrollable flow of tears from his eyes and thus nullifies his enduring wisdom begotten through the understanding of the workings of divine order in the world. Yet there is another attitude to death which is unsettling, that is, how humans perceive the precarity and unpredictability of death beyond the belief in a divine plan and beyond the categories of good and evil epitomised by Ghalib in his inimitable verse: Rau main hai rakhshe umar, kahan dekheye thame Nai haath bagh par hai, na paa hai rikab main. The aggressive metaphor of the unbridled galloping horse for the journey of life is very fearful because neither your hands are on its reins nor are your feet firmly placed in its stirrups. Dr Javaid Iqbal thought his galloping horse will not stop so soon as all the indicators pointed toward relative stability of his health. He thought khon ho ke jigar ankh se tapka nahin, ay margh Rahne de muje yaan ki abhi kam bohut hai. He thought he had still time because jigar did not flow in the form of blood through his eyes which was traditionally considered to be the end of life, least realising that the spring of that blood had already dried up with the killer disease, thus devastating us with his sudden departure. Everyone who knew him has talked about his manifold qualities but I will go to the roots in the background that made those qualities possible. In other words why was Javaid Sb what he was. Some of the broad distinctive traits of his personality that made him what he was are: His sociological imagination nurtured by training in Science and Humanities simultaneously.