HARDIK AND SUMIT (EP-5)

 ITS ALL ABOUT THE MAGIC

“Do you believe in magic?” Sumit asked his friend staring at the half full of scotch glass on the counter.

“Yes. Until you tell me how it is done.” Hardik answered his friend with a cheesy smile.

“No! I am not talking about the stupid card tricks, disappearing the card from the deck and making it reappear in your shirt pocket. That you can achieve with years of practice and a bit of theatricality. I am talking about the weird stuff that those street magicians do. And also those endurance artists and escape artists. Do you believe in them?” There was a different kind of spark in Sumit’s eyes. He really wanted to know if they were all real as if some incidents of his life are directly related to the relevance of such an art.

Hardik put down the glass and turned towards his friend with all seriousness. There must be something that was troubling him. “What street magic are you talking about?” He enquired.

“Yesterday I was just surfing through the public library when I came across a book titled ‘The art of Indian magic’. The author name was not visible. I started reading the book out of curiosity and there I came across the magic trick called ‘The Indian rope Trick’. What the magician would do is that he would take a very long rope in a basket and the rope would start to levitate on its own without any support. Then a boy would climb up the rope and disappear above the clouds. After repeated calling by the magician, the boy would not come down. So being agitated, the magician would climb up the rope with some big sharp knife of sorts. A heavy discussion could be heard followed by body parts of the boy falling from the sky. The magician would climb down and then with some magic spell, would bring the boy back to life, all pieces sewed together, unharmed. Although there is no formal proof of this trick being performed in real, but no one has ever denied of the existence of such an act. So if this trick was ever performed in reality and in this particular fashion in an open field, then can you just discard it by saying it as a big theatric illusion? A lot of magicians in the nineteen hundred had tried to recreate this trick in open but none were successful.  So how can you explain this?” He said all this in one breathe as if he had been waiting a long time let this out. Now he was expecting some definitive answer from his friend.

Hardik took some time to process this information and prepare for a reply. He had also heard about the said trick in his childhood. Although being a physicist his job is to search for the answer to the greatest mysteries of nature but without proper proof he could never discredit the existence of such an trick. Until you disprove it, you can’t discard it, that is the base of science. Being buried alive, drowned under water alive, standing on a pillar for days, holding your breath for exceptionally long time, catching bullets, magicians have endured all what science says is impossible for a human body. Racing against time under the sharp clutches of death, they have escaped it all. Taming minds and making people do things what they would never do in their normal sense, they have hypnotised us all.  But all of the above can be achieved by years and years of practice and dedication towards your craft and so they are called performers. But still some weird thing are there who are yet to be explained and analysed. So he decided to go with some diplomatic answer. “Look buddy! Weirdness is a part and parcel of nature and also of human endeavour. Some people are capable of pulling out some tricks which are very hard to explain but it doesn’t mean that they have the power to channel the supernatural through them. And that is the reason why with some good percentage are people are fooled by these magicians to follow them and consider them divine. So just because some people are just hard to be explained or exposed, don’t believe in their stupidity and hallucination. Magic is good because it provides you the three seconds of awe and bewilderment but don’t take it as a symbol of extra-terrestrial power.”

The situation was too intense and too depressing for a club that serves you scotch on the rocks. So tony slowly filled out the glasses to the full and tickled them towards the magician showing card tricks at the end corner of the bar and the fun started.