Thursday, October 30, 2008

Triangle inequality and the Kollywood Kidnap

Welcome Back!


Introduction
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For the purposes of this post, we need to travel back a little bit in time. Not by a great factor though. May be a decade or two.

Ready?


Okay.

Tighten your seat belts.


Here we go !

swssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh....


1990!

Well, Can you see there a wonderful smart 5 year old little kid in school sitting near a cute little girl and trying to be impressive. Mind you,We are NOT talking about that kid anywhere in this post. That useless brat will grow up in future into a stupid young chap who would irritate people by asking them to read his useless blogs. Anyway, lets forget him and the girl sitting next to him and come back to the point of this post.

Kollywood Kidnap
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How many times have we seen a kidnap scene in Kollywood movies of the nineties? A lot of talented directors have handled various techniques to make such kidnap scenes look different from others but have miserably and invariably failed each time they tried so.

Reasons:

1) It is always one of these two people who get kidnapped. The Heroine or the Hero's younger sister (Yeah, the younger one. When on earth did a tamil hero have an elder sister?)

2) It is always the villain who kidnaps . Of course, he has a gang of well built men who actually do the kidnapping. The villain just lives for eternity in a dark room with dangerously hanging red light bulbs that light up the 'puli bommai' that stands at one corner of the room'. In certain special cases, the villain has a globe in front of his seat which for mysterious reasons he keeps on rotating.

3) If the Hero's sister gets kidnapped, then there is every chance she gets harassed whereas if it is the heroine, then the hero will wait till the villain (and his gang) touch her (so that the "C" grade repeat audience get something to watch ) and then jumps from nowhere right on the top of the villains back.


Such were the crudely done movies of the nineties.

If you are hating the Indian directors for their lack of creativity at trying out something new, then please RETHINK!

Let me narrate one common scene that you might have seen in most of these kidnap related movies.


THE COMMON SCENE
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The hero for unknown reasons is not in the house (may be he has gone to work... i know its really tough to believe that Tamil hero's go to regular 8-5 work). The villain gang (let me use VG in the future to refer to the villain gang) makes use of this situation and goes into the hero's house. The heroine stays alone. VG kidnaps the poor girl who would have otherwise done some innocent looking embroidery and killed time thinking about the hero ( I am not being a chauvinist here, i am just portraying what was shown).

Now for the twist.

The hero returns early to home. Sometimes it is the wallet that he forgot, sometimes he wanted to kiss the heroine once more before he left, sometimes he heard the 'eternal voice' that warned him of impending doom... or whatever crap reason it may be, the hero is back home now.

(TO digress a little bit at this point, if we look at Ramayana, the story is so similar till now. Just that Valmiki was not so dumb like the Indian directors that he never made Rama return back in time when Sita was kidnapped. May be because
Rama never used a Wallet.... watever )


THE CHASE
----------

The hero finds by mere smell that something is wrong in the house. He immediately rushes out and amazingly enough identifies the jeep marks on the soil in front of the house. The heroes eyes are zoomed into now. They burn with red anger. Now his mouth. It moves little bit with terror until the words come out like arrows just out of a bow - "VGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG" .

The chase begins.


Wait a minute!

Here we need to take a deep breath. It is very important that we do so because what is coming is totally mathematical. Totally mind blowing stuff. The total genius of Indian directors will be out in the open lying bare naked for all of us to witness.

What is that which deserves such a huge build up?

Here is the question.

"The VG have already taken the heroine with them in their open jeep and are laughing dangerously at her. The hero's house is in the top of a dangerous hill. By the mere presence of the Jeep track marks, the hero has found out the direction in which the jeep is moving. How should the hero travel now so that he can reach the jeep in time?"

Answer:" TRIANGLE INEQUALITY"



TRIANGLE INEQUALITY
-------------------

Triangle inequality is such a simple fact that people often tend to overlook it.
It just states that
"the sum of the lengths two sides of a triangle is greater than the third side no matter how skewed or symmetric the triangle is"

To see a nice little example, consider the case of a right angled triangle.
The pythogorous theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the right angled sides.

c^2 = a^2 + b^2

Now lets add 2*a*b to both sides

c^2 + 2ab = a^2+b^2+2ab = (a+b)^2

you see it , don't you?

Taking square root on both sides, we get

(a+b) = square_root( c^2 + 2*a*b)

Now the right hand side HAS to be greater than 'c' since we have an extra 2*a*b term lying nearby.

That shows a+b > c - the triangle inequality for a very special case of triangles.

This in fact works out for all triangles and the reader is advised to refer to "Real" mathematical texts to see the proof.



DID THE HEROINE SURVIVE?
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What a stupid question? What a dumb question?

How can the hero with the knowledge of triangle inequality miss to find the heroine. The hero just travels along one side of the triangle while the VG always travels the other two. So the hero travels less distance and so makes up for the time lost in searching for the heroine inside the kitchen!!



There you go.

One more useless post for such a simple concept!

Good bye folks till we meet for the next stupid tutorial.



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The usual Disclaimer.

In case, you wanted to seriously kick the author's butt,
the contact address is in the previous post
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