Flashes of the razor-sharp wit that endeared him to the world media surfaced when Murli Deora asked him for a solution to the present Kargil crisis. ``If you keep inviting American opinion, you might get an American plan of the Kashmir solution,'' quipped the man, who advocated that it was an issue to be settled mutually between the two countries, amid thunderous applause.

Later, for a while, it looked as if the man, who arranged Nixon's historic visit to China and negotiated disengagement agreements between Egypt and Israel, was cornered. The 76-year-old Kissinger mopped his brow and looked around as a speaker threw the bait by asking how he was suddenly advocating India's nuclear status when he had once sent in the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal. Again there werecheers.

``You would want me to say, I made a terrible mistake, but I'm not going to do that,'' said the deep-voiced statesman narrating the reasons. ``At that time we had just opened to China via Pakistan and you had two months later a kind of alliance with the Soviet Union, this had become an issue of the Cold War,'' said Kissinger. And while the US supported the independence of Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi was unwilling to give the US an assurance whether she would not move deeper into West Pakistan. ``We did not want the humiliation of Pakistan.''

In the spirit of reconciliation, he said that the action was not done out of any anti-India sentiment, he said. Every one was acting rationally in their own interests.

A recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Kissinger served as national security advisor and secretary of state under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

He spoke on globalisation and the developing of common views out of the conflict of different national interests. The fact that heextensively dwelt upon economy and trade in his 20-minute-speech, and the presence of Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, industrialists Ratan Tata and SP Godrej, proved without doubt that in the post-Cold War era, economic might mattered more than military power.