A Tribute Sanjaya Baru NOTHING captured Mahbub ul Haq's undying faith in human endeavour and his sense of purpose and optimism better than the closing sentence of a book he wrote bringing together his life's work: "Human destiny is a choice, not a chance".1 It is out of this conviction that Haq worked till his dying day, Mahbub ul Haq, economist, politician, diplomat, propagandist, died at the age of 64 on July 16, 1998, in New York. Born in 1934 in Jammu in pre-partition India, Haq graduated from Government College, Lahore, in 1953 . secured a master's degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1955 and a doctoral degree in economics from Yale University, USA, in 1957. At Cambridge he befriended Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh and through his life he made friends with scores of Indian economists, politicians and mediapersons. My association with Haq began in Stockholm in 1992, at a workshop on the Human Development Report, and was sustained through periodic interaction, the last being in New Delhi earlier this year, when he came to launch the second South Asian Human Development Report, Haq led a multi-faceted life, but it is his contribution to the notion of 'human development' for which he will be remembered, especially in south Asia. This essay is an obituary and a tribute.