New Delhi, Sept. 27 -- When my friend was in school in Delhi, his family put him in Russian class rather than Hindi because they thought that it would give him an advantage in a world where the erstwhile USSR was a superpower. He was happy to not do Hindi but sad that he was not in French where the cool kids were. When he was 14, he took the family car for a secret joyride and in a moment of bravado, gave a drunk, middle-aged Russian man a lift. He successfully figured which hotel to pour the man out at-the only time the Russian ever came handy.

Around the same time, I was a high school student in Oman and my classmate was taking private Arabic lessons because her family, which had come up the hard way at home in Assam, thought their imp...