TRIVIAL TRAVAILS

Mahesh has been in Oman since 1985. After having worked with Bank Muscat and Merrill Lynch, he started Trinity Investments, apparently named because of the three women in his life...his wife and two daughters. You can contact him at mahesh.verma@apexmedia.co.om

It’s mid-Jan today and though it’s already been a fortnight into the New Year, I guess it is still not too late to wish you all a Happy New Year.

Not a brand spanking new year, but oh well, still not a battered black and blue one! Wishing you all a wonderful 2019 - may the best of the past years be the worst of the future! May peace and sanity prevail in the world and may opportunity and prosperity come knocking at your door and may the year ahead bring you good health and happiness.

For those who missed their bi-weekly fix of the TT, my sincere apologies but the hiatus was because of the three-week sojourn in India which had four weddings thrown in. For those who didn’t get the withdrawal symptoms on the non-appearance of the TT on the alternate Tuesday, my heartfelt condolences on the demise of their funny bone.

I remember reading a blog by one David Martin (not Dean but David and definitely not Bond’s ‘shaken-not-stirred’ variety but the plain and simple Wren & Martin type) who had written that the demise of humour in newspapers is more generational than anything. “Gen X, Y and Z are different from their predecessors and the current sad state of humour in print is nothing more than a reflection of their characteristics, interests and values. First of all, the younger generations appear to have a diminished sense of humour” - hey not my words, so don’t shoot

the messenger!

But when it does come to sophisticated or thought-provoking funny stuff, forget the newer generation, even the Baby Boomers just don’t seem to get it. Ask the younger lot to actually sit down and read 700 words (the length of the average TT) and their eyes quickly glaze over…they seem incapable of laughing at anything including themselves.

HAPPY

NEW YEAR

Unfortunately, this appears to be the new reality and there’s nothing one can really do to change it. We just have to accept this not-so-funny fact as a fait accompli and move on. In the world of humour, it’s now Netflix and the chat-show hosts and not the pen, that’s mightier than the sword.

And swishing the sword, last week the hosts Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg presented the 76th Golden Globe Awards which honoured the best in film and American television of 2018, as chosen by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

Obviously, someone in the ‘land of the free and home of the brave’ would have read my last TT, where one had written about Farrokh Balsara and the Bohemian Rhapsody. And lo and behold (or is that ‘Oh’ and behold?), Bohemian Rhapsody won the Best Motion picture in the Drama series, and Rami Malek won the Best Actor’s

award for playing Farrokh Balsara aka Freddie Mercury, in Bohemian Rhapsody.

While many were still recovering from how incredibly well Rami portrayed Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopic, and how much he resembled Freddie, many were equally gobsmacked to see how much this other guy accompanying Rami at the 2019 Golden Globe Awards, resembled Rami.

Turned out that Rami has a real-life identical twin Sami Malek, who is four minutes younger than his Golden Globe-winning brother - the resemblance between the two is, of course, seriously uncanny.

Rami has spoken about his identical twin brother during an earlier appearance on a chat show, where he told the audience a story about filling in for his brother when Sami needed to present a monologue from a Greek tragedy for a class in college. “We don’t look as much alike as we used to, but, yeah, we’re identical.” Wonder how their better-halves overcome this confusion?

And before I sign off, a few random thoughts:

▶Do you know that there are a lot of people out there who jump to all these conclusions only to lose weight?

▶Do you know that there are a lot of people who can make out that you are judgemental just by looking at you?

▶Do you know that despite having forearms we actually only have two arms? Till next fortnight… .