Technology with a twist

The story of how technology added zing to the world’s oldest Bollywood plot…

November 16, 2012 04:49 pm | Updated November 13, 2021 10:17 am IST

Not knowing big names in Bollywood can be quite a problem — especially when you have a brilliant idea and can’t see it come to life on the big screen. Like a sequel to a lost-and-found story — with a twist, of course.

It has three brothers who get lost because of technology, and in the end, it’s technology that brings them together.

It begins with the father — on the run from a gang of goons — texting his wife, asking her to check her inbox. He had sent a mail, giving her directions to meet him at the neighbourhood park and take care of their three sons until he returned.

Unfortunately, the mail gets into the spam folder because he unintentionally mails it to his girlfriends as well. And his wife doesn’t see it.

The father, after hours of waiting in the park, finally sets out to look for the mother.

To make sure that the kids don’t disturb the couples there, he gives the three brothers an iPhone, an iPod and an iPad respectively. As fate would have it, the iPhone has no signal, the iPod has no songs and the iPad has no flash support, so the three brothers go in search of the missing elements in their lives and are duly lost.

The passage of time is shown by a download in progress. Once it reaches 100 per cent, we dissolve to the present. One of the brothers decides to look for his siblings and begins tweeting, using the Twitter handle @luk4akbr_antny.

To his surprise, he gets a response from a stranger tweeting as @luk4amr_antny. Could this be the second brother? Now, all he needed to do was find the person with the Twitter handle @luk4amr_akbr and the family would be together again.

Meanwhile, the second brother is doing his own search. He records the family song and makes it go viral on YouTube. The good news is that he gets a billion views. The bad news is PSY and Justin Bieber had more hits, but they couldn’t be his long-lost brothers.

Finally, the youngest brother tries using Instagram to locate his brothers. An image with the hashtag #oldhouse keeps popping up — it is his old house where he had stayed with his brothers. He also sees an image of a park with the hashtag #linkinpark — this park would be the vital link as all three brothers separated here.

He switches on Google maps and after a long adventure, which involves a couple of romantic duets and a fight, finds the park.

The couples he saw on that fateful day are still there, but there’s no sign of his brothers. Another dead end. Not willing to give up, he gets on to Google. It is Brother’s Day and to celebrate it, the Google Doodle shows three brothers on a specially made cycle for three. This had to be a sign! He uploads a photo of his tattoo on Google+.

Within an hour, he gets three responses, one from a corporate professional with a LinkedIn profile, the second from a Casanova with a Lavalife profile and the third from a jobless youth with a Facebook profile.

The youngest brother is puzzled — he was expecting just two responses. Who was the third? He calls all of them to the park. That’s where he figures that the Facebook and LinkedIn profiles belong to his brothers. The Casanova turns out to be his dad.

The goons land up, there’s a big fight, the brothers win and the family song plays in the background as all of them happily connect with one another through the Family Tree app on Facebook.

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