Movies such as Ram aur Shyam, Sita aur Gita, Chaalbaaz are delightful and heartwarming for so many reasons. They are cute and funny stories about bad people getting their just-desserts. They are also delightful in the way that mistaken identities result in funny situations and heartwarming in that it reunites long lost siblings. This happens in real life as well:
This pair of 33-year-old twins made an unbelievable discovery: that they are identical twins! They were separated at birth when they were adopted from South Korea by American parents. Though Amanda knew that she was one of the twins since she was about eight, it wasn’t confirmed until later when she met Katey after she signed up for the DNA testing service 23andMe. On the other hand, Katey, who had no idea that she had a twin, started to feel that she had a sibling out there some years ago. They met for the first time when they were 33.
They were both born in New York and separated at birth during a bizarre social experiment. They were adopted in 1968 by two different families, but their lives were similar in that they both edited their high school newspapers and studied filmmaking. Elyse went looking for her birth mother when she found out she that had an identical twin. She was able to locate Paula with the help of social workers. It turned out that the girls had been separated at birth as a result of a nurture vs nature study that wanted to examine whether genetics or environment plays a bigger role in shaping human beings, their personalities and lives.
These two twin sisters were also separated at birth and adopted from China by different American families. Both girls had heart conditions and needed surgeries at infancy. The two girls were reunited at age 11 after one of the adoptive mothers made some discoveries when she was looking at a Christmas gift for her daughter. The efforts of the parents and Facebook helped reunite the twins.
These two twin brothers were separated during World War II when their mother was forced into a labour camp. They were adopted by separate Polish families and grew up not knowing about the existence of their twin brother. George Skrzynecky got to know about his twin when he was 17 and started searching for him. However, it was only later that The Red Cross Restoring Family Links Program resulted in the brothers uniting at the ripe old age of 70.
It was a hospital mix-up in Bogota, Colombia that resulted in identical twins being exchanged and two unrelated boys being brought up as fraternal twins in both cases. Wilbur and William were brought up in the countryside while Jorge and Carlos grew up in the city. It was a chance incident at a butcher shop that eventually made both sets realise that their twin was not actually their twin and which later resulted in the actual twins being reunited.
The stories above illustrate the fascinating conundrum that scientists and sociologists have grappled with for so long. Are we the result largely of our genes or is the environment a bigger deciding factor in how we turn out? One of the Bogota twins had the face of his mistaken twin tattooed on his chest (next to the tattoo of his mother) after he found out that he was not his biological twin. This was to say that he was his brother no matter what. Clearly blood is important; but there are many other ties that bind forever. Nurture is clearly at least as important as nature.
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