Read this story in Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Portuguese, Spanish or Tamil. KANAKAPURA, Karnataka, India – In this five-room village school fringed by coconut trees, teacher Ravindra K.

Ten years ago, when I was a newborn lawyer, I inveighed against personal five-year plans. The crux of my argument was that life is like the weather: largely predictable in the short term but ...