• Hello and welcome to Walk the Talk. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, it’s a special privilege to have you on Walk the Talk, a rare appearance on Indian television.

A pleasure to be with you Shekhar.

• You keep coming to India. Your father Josef Korbel worked on Kashmir many years ago. Tell us about what you heard from him and how you became familiar with what has been a most problematic issue for over six decades.

Well, my father was a Czechoslovak diplomat and was the ambassador to Yugoslvia in early 1948. Then he got an assignment to be the Czechoslovakian representative on the new commission on how India and Pakistan were to deal with Kashmir. Then in February 1948, there was a coup in Czechoslovakia and yet, especially the British, wanted my father to continue on that commission because with the coup they’d probably have a communist in his place, so it was better to have a democratic representative. He became chairman of the commission. My parents had already decided they weren’t going back to Czechoslovakia, so we went to England and my father wrote us letters about being in the subcontinent. He talked about Kashmir as the most beautiful place. He got very involved in the situation and wrote a book called Danger in Kashmir. The sign of the difficulty of the issue is that my father is dead, I am old, and the Kashmir issue is still there as a very serious problem.

... contd.