From my earliest years growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City, I was fascinated by people who spoke English with a foreign accent. So when I became a graduate student in political science and international relations, I was in seventh heaven. There seemed to be more foreign graduate students per square foot at Stanford than any place else in the world.
My roommate, for example, was from Oregon. And if his accent wasn't exotic enough, I made friends with fellow students from Finland, Ceylon, France and, most of all, India.
Growing up, I had read about what a poor country India was: how there were beggars in the streets, and misery everywhere. When I didn't finish what I was served for dinner, I was told to think of the starving people in India and how happy they would be to eat what was left on my plate. (The argument never really worked for me because I happily would have packed up my Brussels sprouts and mailed them to Asia.)
The Indians I met at Stanford—although most were slim—defied such stereotypes. They were the sons of rajas or wealthy businessmen. One asked me to advise him on the purchase of 2,000 albums he wanted to send to India so that he could listen to Western classical music when he returned home.
Over lunch one day, he told me a story about his father that helped explain where his record-buying wealth had originated. In the 1950s, Americans still manufactured things, and Indians were eager to purchase some of them. But import duties greatly reduced the profit margins of importers. However, if items?say, a load of tennis shoes?arrived at Indian customs and were not claimed by anyone within 30 days, they would be auctioned off.
My friend's father ordered a huge shipment of sneakers from a U.S. company with the stipulation that all the left-footed shoes be packaged separately from all the right-footed shoes. The left-footed shoes were to be shipped to Bombay, and 60 days later the right-footed shoes were to be shipped to Calcutta.
The shipment sent to Bombay went unclaimed, so after 30 days it was auctioned off. Because no one could think of a use for a huge shipment of left-footed sneakers, no one bid against my friend's father and he picked up these shoes for next to nothing. The situation was repeated with the right-footed sneakers in Calcutta. My friend's father paired the shoes and made the kind of money that sent his son to a fine American university.
As much as I may have gotten out of all the graduate seminars and term papers I had to write at Stanford, I learned even more about international relations from the personal international friendships that started on the Farm and have continued for the rest of my life.
However, I never was able to figure out a way to send my own kids to Stanford by selling Indian sneakers to Americans.
FRED FLAXMAN, MA '64, of Weaverville, N.C., is the producer and presenter of Compact Discoveries, a classical-music radio series. His new book is Sixty Slices of Life . . . on Wry: The Private Life of a Public Broadcaster.
