How Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam became Irandam Ulagam?

 Selvaraghavan's Irandam Ulagam is almost 7 years in the making. If you had certain favourable or unfavourable observations about Irandam Ulagam and its progression of the storyline, the following background could help understand how the movie evolved.

Karthi and Sandya as Medical Students

The movie was initially planned with Karthi and Sandhya as medical students and titled "Idhu Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam". Later, the movie was swiftly dropped due to unknown reasons, Selva moved on to "Aayirathil Oruvan" with Karthi's dates and signed up a new producer.

Dhanusha and Andrea roped in for "Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam"

After completing the long-delayed Aayirathil Oruvan, Selva took up "Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam" again with Dhanush and Andrea as the lead pairs. The movie made fast progress with almost 50% complete and the team was upbeat that the love chemistry had come out well. Later, Selva had some issues with the lead artiste in the movie and Selva was unable to continue the movie shooting with the same set of lead cast and characters. So, Selva had to abruptly drop the movie claiming the losses incurred.

Dhanush's date used for a quickie, Mayakkam Enna

Selva still had almost around 50 days of Dhanush's dates that the director did not want to be wasted. So, he decided to take some interesting situations from the existing script and extended it out into a full-fledged quickie and titled it as "Mayakkam Enna".

PVP decides to produce "Irandam Ulagam" 

During the meantime, Selva could not let go off his dream project and showed the first half of "Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam" to PVP production house. PVP was bowled over by the emotions in the movie and wanted to produce it at a bigger scale and release it as bilingual. Selva introduced the fantasy angle in the second half and roped in Anushka, Arya on to the project along with Harris Jayaraj. "Maalai Nerathu Mayakkam" changed to "Maravan" and then finally became "Irandaam Ulagam" after shooting started.

In between all these, it is not entirely clear whether Selva's dropped movie with Chiyaan Vikram(Sindubad) may have had any similarities with the fantasy story seen in Irandam Ulagam since the shooting location was also set in extreme cold conditions in Ladakh and Leh.

It is clear that the final outcome seen on the screen for "Irandam Ulagam" is influenced by a long series of actions and unexpected twist of events spanning over 7 years.