In search of "The Drunken Butterfly"

A couple of days ago, while scrolling through Google Photos on my mobile, I found a video that I had saved long ago. 

It's an exercise sequence. 

In the video, which is around six-and-half minutes long, you will find the same exercise sequence repeated by nine persons in nine different settings. 

I recalled that it was sent to me by someone on WhatsApp during the Covid days. Since I had liked it, I had saved it in my Google Photos.

When I found this video a couple of days ago, I was quite curious as to what the song is, from which country it is, and also if this is any popular exercise sequence or dance form.

The only clue were some words, probably Chinese, superimposed on the video.

I gave an image search on Google to see if this video already existed on the Internet. But I couldn't find any results.

In order to know what the words are, and also to understand more about the image, I used Google Lens. 

The words are Chinese, and the Lens app threw up translations like: Look at the numbers - Lesson dance - Drunk butterfly.

That was some progress!

Encouraged by that, I gave a Google search for 'Drunk butterfly'.

On Spotify, I found an album "Drunk Butterfly" and a song "Drunken Butterfly" by Sonic Youth an American rock band.

I also found, images of, obviously, butterflies. 

The search also threw up images of plants and flowers.

I then refined the search as "drunk butterfly exercise".

Then I got videos and images of various exercise poses. Nothing even remotely similar to what was in that video.

I refined the search further thus: "drunk butterfly exercise Chinese".

The first result was this video posted on Bilibili. It's a Shanghai-based video-sharing website.

The music is the same as in the WhatsApp video. But it's animation and not real people.

Below the Bilibili result, I found this video on YouTube. It's titled 'Drunken Butterfly'.

The music is the same. Now, real people are doing a dance sequence. 

It's clearly an exercise, because, using Google Lens, I figured out phrases in Chinese like 'lose weight at home' were superimposed on the video.

I continued my search on YouTube with different keywords.

And I found this one, that seemed to give some information. 

It has the lyrics of the song in Pinyin (Mandarin written in Roman/Latin script), and also its English translation.

This website says Chinese song The Drunken Butterfly (Jiu Zui De Hu Die, in Chinese) is sung by Cui Wei Li, and the lyrics and music composition are by Liu Hai Dong. The website has the lyrics and English translation.

Later, I found on YouTube the video I had got on WhatsApp two years ago.

I also noticed that most of The Drunken Butterfly videos were uploaded on YouTube in mid-2020, when Covid struck.

Looks like it became popular when people were locked up in their homes and were desperate to do some exercise.

What money can buy and what it can't

This morning I was listening an interesting documentary on BBC World Service -- The reluctant millionaires. 

It's about the super-rich people -- mainly in the United States -- who are campaigning against the wealth they themselves possess. 

They are mostly people who are born rich, and have remained / grown rich because of the environment in which they have been in. 

However, they aren't quite happy with the financial system which allows the rich to get richer, at the cost of others who don't have as much money as they have, making the latter become poorer. They have formed a group - Patriotic Millionaires.

The BBC documentary, which focusses on wealth inequality, is presented by Abigail Disney, filmmaker and multimillionaire heiress to the Disney empire. 

Bringing in personal insights, she explores the present skewed distribution of money, the harm it does to the society, and what can be done to improve the situation.

The 50-minute programme is available online.

WEALTH IS IMPORTANT

We need money - for basic necessities like food, clothing, and shelter; and for minimum comforts and good physical and mental wellbeing that make our lives worth living.

We work in order to get money. We change jobs so that we get more money.

How much money is enough money? 

No one knows, because it varies from person to person. What is one individual's luxury is another one's necessity.

WHAT WEALTH CAN BUY AND CAN'T 

But we know why we need money. We also know that money can't get us many critical things in our lives.

Money can get us material comforts, but not peace of mind and happiness.

Money can buy us food, but not wellbeing and good health.

Money can build relationships, but not affection and love.

(Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay)

Rishi Sunak and India

The announcement on Oct 24 of Rishi Sunak's appointment as PM was understandably big news in the UK.

In India too!

One, it was on Diwali, and coincidence was instantly picked up.

Two, he got married in Bengaluru in 2009, a celebrity event.

Three, the new PM's father-in-law Narayana Murthy, who co-founded Infosys, is a household name in Bengaluru. So much so that it was as if the next-door-neighbour had become the UK PM.

The Prime Minister's mother-in-law, Sudha Murty, is equally famous. A computer engineer, she is a very popular author of children's books, educationist, and philanthropist.

Not surprisingly, one of the jokes doing the rounds was that parents here have a new career goal and benchmark for the children! (See, what Rishi has become ...!")

On Oct. 24, soon after it was known who the next British PM will be, Vidyarthi Bhavan, the iconic restaurant here tweeted a photo of him at the restaurant.

#RishiSunak is going to become the next PM of UK.
Happy to know that he will be the first Indian-origin & the youngest British Prime Minister.
We wish him good luck & may he become the most successful PM of UK by sailing through all the turbulence pic.twitter.com/JhWLtcVTu2

— Vidyarthi Bhavan (@VidyarthiBhavan) October 24, 2022

(By the way, I had written about Vidyarthi Bhavan in an A to Z Challenge post last year.)

All this excitement in India will die down soon.

Hinduism and India are the last things on the new British PM's mind. 

He'll be extremely careful and not do anything that might be seen as being partial to the country his wife, Akshata, is a citizen of. Not to mention the controversies linked to her, which he seems to have survived for now.