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Twice as nice

Hunt FOR THE BEST TWINS In ‘Airtel MTV Connected’

In 1974, a woman went to a temple, where an old woman told her she would bear two children, Ram and Lakshman. She kept repeating their names till the woman left the temple precincts.

In 1975, the woman gave birth to identical twins — boys both, whom they decided to name Ram and Lakshman, with prefixes Raghu and Rajiv. Yes. We are talking about the same twins that has raised a storm on the Indian television scene by making rude the new cool and shoving nice out of the window.

Incredulous story, you pipe up, and Raghu nods in agreement. “It’s totally bizarre but true,” says the elder of the twins, adding: “as are most stories about identical twins.” With 20 others of their ilk joining them on the show ‘Airtel MTV Connected’, Raghu and Rajiv are trying to treat this ‘phenomenon of identical twins’ with the respect it deserves.

The terror twins are out to spot the most connected twins — it’s not a test of the most talented, fastest, strongest or the most intelligent.

Which means that even if one of them is bad at a task, and if the other is equally bad, they still stand to win a trip to the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

“Often, you may have laughed at the filmy portrayal of twins such as one getting hurt if the other is beaten etc., but we have seen it for ourselves that it is true,” says Rajiv, narrating an incident when he felt a slap across the face when Raghu was hit by their father for not bringing home his brother.

The worst part about being twins is definitely the attention it automatically warrants. “As a child, I was painfully shy. Rajiv was my security blanket,” says Raghu, immediately offering an explanation at my surprise. “I have opened up after facing the camera. Thanks to our situation, I couldn’t escape eyes following us wherever we went. So, while the good thing is that you are actually born with a friend who is just like you, you are also a born celeb, like it or not. People are so fascinated by you.”

Rajiv feels each of us starts resembling the living beings we are close to. “Observe masters and pets, or couples after years of staying together. What happens in twins is that it is several times magnified, since birth.”

So, were there cases when girlfriends used to confuse one for the other or fall for the other when the first was pursuing her? It has been a bouquets-and-brickbats experience with MTV Roadies. “We get extreme reactions. I have received as many death threats as marriage proposals,” says Raghu.

Says Rajiv: “Even when I wasn’t facing the camera for Roadies, people mistook me for Raghu, though I had hair! There have been no death threats, but my wife and child once got dragged into some murky comments posted on a website and we had to call in the cyber crime police.”

Raghu is now set to be part of Abbas Tyrewala’s film “1-800-Love” starring Abbas’ wife Pakhi and John Abraham.

“I had been offered several films, but I neither had the time nor were the scripts interesting. I have never acted before, so there is going to be a fairly large part of me in this role. And, unlike what is being said about the role, it’s not a comic one.”

Rajiv says that as creative head of a content generating company he has no time for acting.

“As twins too, we have received offers but none too interesting.”

Rajiv says being a twin makes his life story a walking-talking fiction script unravelling itself every day. Hmm.

As for the story behind their name, we are still nonplussed.

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