JOIN USMy cousin, Dathi, was a Hollywood movie buff. When I was in high school, he was pursuing an engineering degree and was very good at math. I used to seek him out for help with solving math problems. Dathi used to call me Richie. When asked why, he used to say that I resembled Richard Burton— a famous Hollywood actor then. He liked calling my older brother Mohan, Tony. According to him, Mohan resembled Tony Curtis.
When I started my first job after engineering, my colleague Sreeshaila took me home for lunch. He had a stereo -tape- recorder at home which was very popular in those days. He played some songs of Boney M for me. I fell in love those tunes the minute I hear them, instantly became becoming a fan of western music. Whenever I travelled abroad on work assignments, I started collecting music cassettes. I also got hooked to FM Radio abroad to listen to western music. My music collection grew pretty fast. When my son started playing with cassettes, his curiosity led to the dismantling and unwinding of many tapes. Nevertheless, during a recent spring cleaning, I found so many music cassettes from my past. I didn’t know what to do with them as most of my cassette players weren’t functioning anymore and reluctantly I parted with my acquisitions to a junk collector!
Technology changed. Tapes gave way to CDs and DVDs. Now, USB Pen Drives helped carry our favourite music. Streaming music videos on TV Channels and YouTube has become a the in-thing now. We enjoy watching our favourite singers perform in the age of the new media. That’s when, like my cousin Dathi, I started spotting similarities to singers with the ladies and gentlemen in our circles. I noticed that Vidya, my son’s schoolmate resembles the singer, Avril Lavigne. Another Vidya, my niece, looks very much like Taylor Swift. While my nephew Laxman’s looks match rapper Drake, my sister-in-law, Jai, closely resembles Britney Spears.; Naman, a classmate of my son, reminds me of DJ, Clive Harris. Finally, my friend’s daughter Sheetal resembles singer, Miley Cyrus.
In this age of AI applications with Neural Networks and Deep Learning, Google Photos can group pictures of the same person. I think AI services will catch up with me to show which celebrity a person resembles, if at all there is one. Although there are some services that I have come across these days, per my testing, none of them did a satisfactory job on my subjects. Perhaps our mind does a gait analysis apart from facial connection when spotting a look-alike of a person.
So, my hunt for celebrity look-alikes in our circle continues!