Stopping at Seven Wonders with Shankar
I Still, remember the days when the Jeans movie’s audio cassette was released, which had a bunch of good songs with some freebies along and how desperate I was to get myself one. Around 20 years have passed since then and a lot of things have changed.
The female lead of the Jeans movie, Aishwarya Rai who used to be a dream girl for many looks more like elegant women now. Top star, Prashanth has grown some hair, beard and has put on a few kilos ( tonnes). I am pretty sure he won’t fit into his old jeans now but if he still wants to make a good use of it he could probably use them as socks. With all that said, one thing that remains unchanged is Shankar’s exotic love for songs and his craze to splash the cash to film them.
In a time when people are debating whether songs should actually be part of a movie or not, the amount of money Shankar spends just on filming songs is mammoth. It is like as soon as Shankar signs for a movie he is given a war chest of fortunes and he starts filming songs and if something is left over he will shoot a few scenes and place it front and back of those songs and present it as a film.
Everyone will still remember the time he gave travel goals for the whole world when he shot a song for the movie Jeans at all the seven wonders of the world. People who update status and post pictures with taglines and “Bitten by Travel Bug”, “Wanderlust” from the weekend trip to Maangadu, should acknowledge the fact that Shankar did all those things before it was cool and if you are bitten by a travel bug he probably was bitten by a travel dragon.
Incase if you haven’t seen the song yet, here it is.
The English translation of lyrics goes something like:
The bunch of fruits hidden in the flowers are wonders!
The arts on the wings of butterflies are wonders!
The air travelling through a gap turning into a sweet music is a wonder!
The cuckoo’s song without having a guru is a wonder!
A wonder to amaze all the other wonders, you are my wonder!
Wah! What lines! Thanks for the enthusiastic folks who translated this to English for a question in Quora. These lines are enough to make your crush fall in love with you as well as convince your producer for a budget to travel around the world to film the song in all seven wonders.
All the Seven wonders appear in the following sequence in this song:
Apart from the wonders themselves what wonders me is the question of which route they would have taken to visit all Seven wonders in an optimized way. So I did google out the geo-coords for all the seven wonders of the song. A small python library, geopy was helpful in calculating the distance between the two subsequent geo coordinates. With distance for each hop calculated, the total distance of the trip came up to 32,959 Kms which is only a little less than the circumference of the earth 40,075 km. Considering Earth is spherical and the two farthest points in the earth are only 19,842km apart, anyone can guess that the places appearing in the song in the sequence must not be filmed in that order. You need not be a CID Shankar to find this out.
So, if this was not the order, then what was the order that It was filmed? That is the problem which I will be trying to solve in this blog. Since there are only seven places and we know the distance between them, with few trial and errors we can easily solve this problem, but we won’t be solving it that way. There is a theory behind and let us use that.
Let’s consider each wonder as a node in the Graph. These wonder being places on earth you can visit any wonder from any other wonder. Which forms a graph where all the nodes are connected to every other node.
People who are familiar with Computer Networks and Network theory will be familiar with the problem that we are going to solve.
Picking shortest path between two nodes in a network is relatively simple, but here the problem we are facing is to find the shortest path that will connect all the nodes together. It is kind of Steiner Tree problem which will give the shortest path connecting a subset of nodes from the given graph. Since the subset of nodes in our case is all the nodes in our network, this is a case of minimum spanning tree problem. It is also popularly called as Travelling salesman problem.
So, that’s the theory behind. I used a python program to get this problem solved for me. I followed the first rule of programming to get the thing done. Unlike what they teach in school the first rule of programming isn’t writing pseudocode or drawing flowchart but it is to search whether someone has already implemented it. As always, the first rule worked for me, found a python code solution to the Steiner Tree Problem here. It did give me a path where Empire State building was visited last. Since half the movie was shot in the US let’s assume the crew started out from the US. So the same shortest path solution rearranged to start from the US looks like the one below.
The total distance covered was reduced almost half to 17,495 Kms. The producer is happy and feels thankful to the Steiner tree solution for haven’t saved few bucks for him, meanwhile Shankar is planning to use the saved bucks to design a poster.
If you visit The Wonders of the world page in wiki, you will realise that the list is a mess. There are the following different lists of Seven wonders:
American Society of Civil Engineers
USA Today’s New Seven Wonders
Seven Natural Wonders of the World
New7Wonders of the World
New7Wonders of Nature
New7Wonders Cities
Seven Wonders of the Underwater World
Seven Wonders of the Industrial World
Other lists of wonders of the world
Seven Wonders movie
Seven Wonders of the Solar System
This reminds me of my old Blog about the list of Colleges under Anna University, Anna University- Remember the Name.
Trying to address all the chaos that each list was creating, monuments and structures In 2001 an initiative was started by the Swiss corporation New7Wonders Foundation to choose the New7Wonders of the World from a selection of 200 existing monuments. Twenty-one finalists were announced January 1, 2006. Egyptians were not happy that the only surviving original wonder, the Great Pyramid of Giza, would have to compete with the likes of the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House, and other landmarks, calling the project absurd. In response, Giza was named an honorary Candidate. So Ironically the list of Seven wonders of the world has eight wonders.
1.Great Wall of China
2. Petra
3. Christ the Redeemer
4. Machu Picchu
5. Chichen Itza
6. Colosseum
7. Taj Mahal
8. Great Pyramid of Giza (Honorary Candidate)
No, we have not diverted from the topic, We will come back to where we started. Fast forwarding to the year 2009–2010 Shankar again pairs up with Aishwarya Rai for Enthiran. He needs to shoot a song in an exotic location. Having visited most of the places in new wonders of the world list and considering it would not be nice to dance before Christ the Redeemer, Shankar decides to shoot a song for Enthiran in Machu Picchu.
I did run through the lyrics this time too whether to check if there is anything in it to convince the producer for a budget to shoot a song at Machu Picchu in Peru.
There are two places that were mentioned in the lyrics of this song.
The two places mentioned in the lyrics are not even close to Machu Picchu where this song was shot. They are poles apart from each other, just like the budget of the movies directed by director Shankar and the budget of the movies produced by director Shankar.
