The Millions Room

I was stunned by the beauty of the Millions Room in the Schonnbrunn Palace in Vienna. The room was dimly lit when I visited it, as opposed to the glowing red in the photograph I stole from the Palace website. I was fascinated that Indian art was famous in 18th-century Vienna. I'll quote the palace website description of the room, because it gives a wealth of information:

Originally called the Feketin Cabinet, this room became known as the Millions Room on account of its precious rosewood panelling.

Set into sixty-one Rococo cartouches in this panelling are Indo-Persian miniatures showing scenes from the private or court life of the Mogul rulers in India in the 16th and 17th century.

In order to fit the miniatures into the asymmetrical shapes of the cartouches, individual leaves were cut up by members of the imperial family and put together to form new pictures in a sort of collage.

Another remarkable feature of this room is the chandelier, a piece of Viennese craftsmanship dating to 1760, made of bronze with enamel flowers. The bust behind the settee is of Maria Theresa's youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, later Queen of France.

I do remember some of the minatures being scenes from the lives of Hindu kings and queens, and not only from those of Moghul rulers. If anyone is interested in doing a research project on this room (and knows how to get funding for a flight and stay in Vienna as well) count me in!

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

While reading Outliers, I reminisced about the time when I was in Business School, and was struggling with the art of cracking cases for management consulting interviews. Some interviews went disastrously, but I finally got the hang of deconstructing cases by the end of the 2nd-year interview cycle. But the fact is that I'm not in consulting, and my thought processes are far less structured now.

The book underlies how a systematic approach to problems can yield some eye-opening results. I admire the examples Gladwell presents, and depth to which he has researched each one. However his basic argument is very simple: that success is dependent on hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies.

There's one point I don't agree with. In order to explain why Americans of Asian descent do better in college than the majority of Americans, Gladwell makes the generalization that all Asians come from rice growing cultures. I'd momentarily accept the argument that farmers who worked on rice fields learned to work harder than other farmers in other regions of the world, whose crops were more seasonal. However, assuming that all hard-working Asians can be traced to paddy fields, sounds a tad bit simplistic to me. When I was in the US earlier this year, I watched a high-school spelling competition on TV. About 70%+ of the finalists were of Indian descent. I can wager that their families in India had dramatically different backgrounds, and many of the competitors' parents may have immigrated from cities. The impact of an agrarian lifestyle on family culture could have been erased for at least three to four generations.