India, Feb. 9 -- It was the Hindustan Times' chief photographer, the late Arun Jetlie, who taught me how to drive in the mid-eighties. He would come home, take me in the car, and drive to the Raj Bhavan area in Patna, where the roads were wide and welcoming. Calm and methodical, Arun was such a natural teacher that I often felt he could have run a driving school and made it a success.

Another lesson came years later, and it had nothing to do with driving. It came from Narendra Modi, then Chief Minister of Gujarat. The word he taught me was "Miya." Though I had been living in North India since 1973-moving through newsrooms, railway stations, court corridors, and political meetings-I had never heard the word used the way Modi did.

The set...