  We examine here the relevance of the initial state of a collapsing dust cloud
towards determining it's final fate in the course of a continuing gravitational
collapse. It is shown that given any arbitrary matter distribution $M(r)$ for
the cloud at the initial epoch, there is always a freedom to choose rest of the
initial data, namely the initial velocities of the collapsing spherical shells,
so that the collapse could result either in a black hole or a naked singularity
depending on this choice. Thus, given the initial density profile, to achieve
the desired end state of the gravitational collapse one has to give a suitable
initial velocity to the cloud. We also characterize here a wide new family of
black hole solutions resulting from inhomogeneous dust collapse. These
configurations obey the usual energy conditions demanding the positivity of
energy density.
