Nepal, April 26 -- My journey from the hills of Pokhara to the halls of Harvard was not easy. However, along the way, I have often found myself confronting an uncomfortable question: What would my life have looked like had I been born not in Pokhara, but in a village in Humla? Not into my family, but into one without the same footing? I made it here, and I am grateful. But gratitude has never quite silenced the question. It is, in fact, the question that led me to study political philosophy at Harvard, and eventually to the work of John Rawls.

What a just society ought to look like is one of the prime questions in political philosophy. Having read across the works from Plato to Marx, it is Rawls and his magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, ...