India, June 6 -- On May 30, I spoke at the Cambridge Union as part of the Cambridge India Business Dialogue, in conversation with Professor Jaideep Prabhu of the Judge Business School. I had been told it would run for about an hour; the room had other intentions. Hands kept rising, the questions deepened, and what had been planned as a single session became nearly three across two days.

What struck me was not the grandeur of the surroundings but the quality of the hunger. These were economists and business scholars, trained to solve problems with models, data and policy; yet something in that room kept returning, insistently, to a question no model addresses: the question of the self that produces the crises the world is so busy trying t...