India, Feb. 15 -- Dear Reader,

I am in the city of Goethe, where steel and glass buildings rise through wintry fog. On the outskirts, silver oaks and beech trees stand skeletally against a grey sky. It's cold outside but cocooned inside our black Mercedes cab, we glide over the autobahn at 160 km per hour.

As the landscape blurs by, I think back to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German poet, politician and scientist, born here in Frankfurt, two hundred and seventy-five years ago. I think of Faust, his story of a scientist who barters his soul to the devil. It feels like a nice literary reference-until Goethe's ghost begins following me through Frankfurt, whispering uncomfortable truths about our modern lives.

It starts one morning when we...