Taj enters exclusive club of New Seven Wonders

LISBON: It’s official. The Taj Mahal is now one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. At a glittering presentation ceremony in Lisbon last night, the Taj was accorded the coveted status for which voting had been on with great enthusiasm over the last few months.

The New Seven Wonders of the World was a worldwide attempt to select the top seven world heritage sites in a method that was scientific and democratic. In India, the Bhaskar Group spearheaded the campaign to get the Taj among the new seven wonders.

Ramesh Chandra Agarwal, chairman of the Bhaskar group, said, “It is a matter of great pride to every Indian that the Taj Mahal has earned its well-deserved status as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

It was my duty as an Indian to champion the cause of the Taj and lead this movement as the official partner of the New Seven Wonders Foundation in India.”

The effort to name the new seven wonders was started seven years ago by Dr Bernard Weber, a Swiss author and aviator. His intention was to build a true public consensus of opinion on the last 2000 years of human achievement.”

 The renowned ancient wonders belong to antiquity and, with the exception of the Pyramids, none remains in existence. The beginning of the new millennium is a historical moment for determining the New 7 Wonders of the World,” he said.

Though everyone had heard of the Seven Wonders of the World, none had actually seen them because only one, the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt, of the seven ‘must-see’ destinations is still standing.

So, with the Seven Wonders of the World no longer actually giving wonder to the world, it seemed the perfect time to start again and nominate an all new set of Seven Wonders of the World.

With strict rules like all nominations having to be man-made, be in an “acceptable” state of preservation and to have been completed by 2000, nominations were whittled down by public votes to 77 last year.

Then, Dr Weber took the help of former UNESCO Director-General Federico Mayor Zaragoza, who led a panel of architectural experts to shortlist 21 candidates for the vote, from the list of 77 heritage structures.

The New 7 Wonders Society, a Swiss group with the preservation of man-made heritage close to its heart, then began the hunt for the new Seven Wonders of the World, via the first global voting campaign.

What was shocking was that voting from India was abysmally low till mid-May 2007. It was then that the Bhaskar group’s integrated interactive solutions enterprise, I Media Corp Ltd (IMCL), spearheaded this movement and resolved to get Taj to the New Seven Wonders List.

The New Seven Wonders Foundation appointed IMCL as its partner in India and sole official voting facilitator in India for the New Seven Wonders. 

IMCL, in turn, kicked off a nationwide movement under the aegis of “India Unites for the Taj”.  Said Bharat Kapadia, chairman of “India Unites for the Taj”: “We were determined to get the Taj Mahal to the Seven Wonders and we know we could achieve it if we could make people aware of the task on hand.”

IMCL roped in A R Rahman to compose an anthem, which he composed, co-wrote and sang. It was a ‘yes’ at first contact for Rahman. “I was in London when IMCL contacted me, and I was very excited about composing the anthem.

It was very short notice, but my crew and I grabbed the idea and made special time for working on the anthem,” he said. Rahman unveiled the soulful anthem—rendered in six languages — to kick off the India Unites for the Taj movement on May 24, 2007.

Voting for the Taj never looked back after that. As the first evidence of that, the ranking declared by the New Seven Wonders Foundation on June 7 revealed that the Taj had climbed the rankings to be among the top 10 candidates out of the 21 in the running. The rest, as they say, is history.