Dear Friends,
To err is human. But, more often than not, it is also a harbinger of a divine comedy. William Shakespeare must have realized this universal truth way back in 1556 when he wrote his first well known play, "A Comedy of Errors". It was based on a series of humorous situations arising out of mistaken identities creating confounded confusion around a pair of identical twins. Since then, this theme of "twins" has been exploited ad nauseum by playwrights and producers of Hollywood and Bollywood in several plays and movies ranging from "Corsican Brothers", "Double Trouble", "The Parent Trap" to our own "Do Dooni Char", "Seeta aur Geeta", "Ram aur Sham" and "Angoor". The plot of these comic stories revolves typically around a pair of identical twins, who invariably get separated at birth either in an earthquake, shipwreck or in some such natural calamity and then, they are both raised in different parts of the world, unknown to each other, only to cross their paths later in life as young, handsome men, madly in love with the same girl, who, not unusually, has an identical twin sister! As if the chaos arising out of two pairs of identical twins is not enough, don't be surprised if our Bollywood script writers go ahead and add one more pair of twins as 'sidekicks' of the twin heroes!
It reminds me of the twins, Sudhir and Suhas who I used to know in my childhood; both resembled each other so much that even their parents sometimes found it difficult to tell them apart. One of the twins, Sudhir was the smarter of the two and had a mischievous streak that he would always play some mischief or childish prank and then very innocently he would point a finger at his brother, Suhas and the poor chap had to bear the brunt of the victim's wrath, often getting punished by the parents for something which he had not done. In the college, Sudhir was very popular among the students, especially the female kind while Suhas being the serious type, was always engrossed in his own work and studies. After their graduation, Suhas did the only smart thing ever in his life: he left for London for higher studies, before his twin brother, the flirt that he was, could get him into some serious trouble!
Having a twin brother or sister, while it may be a sufficient condition, it is not always so necessary for getting into an unenviable, funny situation through an error of judgement because of 'mistaken identity'; you can get into trouble even if you have around an identical 'namesake' as happens to me in the short story, "Surely, You are joking Mr. Hattangadi", or sometimes through a mistaken possession of someone else's belonging as in the next story, "Hot Pursuit".
Happy reading !
