 Hello, good morning, good evening, hi, check. Hello, does this work? So this is, nobody is it on or off? Hello, hi. How are you people, should we start? So it's really strange to be speaking to a mic that doesn't make any sound, but I'm told this is for the recording. Alright, so our speaker today is Nakul Shanay. Nakul is a magician. They're going to learn what that means. Now, the funny thing is, like, my first meeting with Nakul was more than 10 years ago. I think it was somewhere around 2001 or 2002. It was really long back. We had met on this blogging site called LiveJournal. And the first time we met, Nakul had this really strange profile picture. So I couldn't even tell if he was a real person or not. But the first time we met, he told me about some guy named Habermas. And looking at his, this is who the heck is Habermas. And he said, he defined this thing called the public sphere. And I said, what the fuck is a public sphere? You know, I mean, you're talking about a ball that's in public or what? And so Nakul gave me this really long dump about this theory of society of public sphere and how you can communicate in public with other people in the public, form public opinions, how the notion of a public works in the first place. And that kind of set me off on this journey where until then I had been a computer programmer and I had been a writer for a magazine. But as a writer for a magazine, my idea of doing this was you write, somebody reads, and that's about it. And what Nakul did at that point was set me off on a path that looked not as writing and reading, but as community saying, what are you doing that influences people's opinions that gets them together to talk to each other, build communities and so on. And since then that sort of been the path I took that ended up, you know, building communities with Parkam Bangalore, with Hasgeek and with various internet movements now. And so I have to really credit Nakul for setting me off on that path by giving me the little bit of theory that I needed to say, okay, this is not some random thing. I'm thinking of it's something that has been discussed and debated over decades. You know, building on work that has been built up over centuries. Okay, so Nakul, thanks for that. And thank you. Thanks, Kiran. That was like much more than the intro I expected to even claim a small part of the wonderful things you guys are doing is this phenomenal. So thank you. Hi, everybody. I'm Nakul, Nakul Shinoy. I now live in Bangalore. And this idea also needs to be credited of me coming on as part of this wonderful session of Hasgeek, The Open House. Recently I believe it was Prem Panikkar that went after Zainab and said, why don't you get Nakul to do a series on magic. And it's relevant. It's connects to different things that we go through because most of us look at magic. Most of us look at magic mostly as birthday entertainment, right? Where the kids are put thankfully along with the magician and adults can run away, right? For their peace. So, and since if we said, okay, we're going to do a series on magic and the theory of magic and how to appreciate magic, we thought it might not interest too many people. So we said, why don't we spin off on a recent TEDx talk that I did, because where is magic and technology headed next? With all these things of Internet of Things, enchanted objects and things like that. So that's where this idea comes from for magic and technology. So I'm going to run you through, it's a geek conference, right? I'm going to run you through some slides and I'm going to try and tell you how I look at magic and how magic exists and then we would perhaps have some questions towards the end and hopefully enough interest that we actually have a second part to the series, right? So like all things are normal, we go to the God, right? To find out what is magic and so when you, because as magicians, we forget this. As magicians, most of the times the problem is that we come into magic because let me tell you why I came into magic. As a very small kid, I went to a magic show and I guess it was in my school. I don't quite remember where and this magician came on stage. He came on and he showed that he had one, two, three, four, five and six cards. And from those six cards, he sort of showed those like this and then he took one, he took two, he took three, threw them off and after a moment he showed that he still had one, two, three, four, five and six cards. I clapped. I love the stunned silence but I clapped. And it didn't stop there. He just showed that he still had one, two, three, four, five, six cards and from those six cards, many number of times he took one, two, three cards threw them away, still showed that he had one, two, three, four, five and six cards. Yeah, that's okay. It's a long story because the magician did this multiple times. I went up to him afterwards, tried to learn it from him but you know I never learned that magic so even now I don't know it so I can't really show that to you. I love you, I love you really. So, but as magicians once we come into magic we sort of forget why we are in magic because at some point when we come into it you looking at it not as tricks, not as secrets, not as other things you're looking at this as something very, very powerful that you can learn and make real things happen, right? So this is spot on. It says the power of apparently influencing events by using mysterious or supernatural forces having or apparently having supernatural powers. Wonderful and exciting because if it's not wonderful and exciting it's not magic, right? It's a set of puzzles, it's a set of perhaps mysteries for people to solve and primarily when you think magic, Merlin comes to mind because Merlin has existed in our fantasy in almost every spin-off of magical stories and fables you have Merlin or an equivalent to Merlin, right? I just watched Star Wars yesterday so yeah, so the Yoda or whatever, right? For most of us, this is the quintessential image of a magician. This was Dante. Dante was in the early 1900s and sort of was this image that anybody looked at him he's like this, right? Any day you meet him on the streets and stuff he's walking with his wand and things like that and so you look at him and goes, it must be a magician, right? We had something like this from India too. This is the newer version of it, right? He's 70 by the way, right now, so newer version, this is Junior but generally I couldn't find a sort of a hirer's image for a piece of Sarkar himself so I went with Junior, he's a phenomenal person too but Sarkar was who took Indian magic to the world and became along with the other like Dante the greatest magicians of the world tag was claimed by him from India, right? So these are different imagery of magic. We all have these various imageries of magic but primarily for me, why I got into magic was Mandrake. How many of you here know Mandrake? My generation right there, you know Habermas and all that, right? So Mandrake was created by the same guy that created Phantom, yeah? And Mandrake is the first superhero of the world. He's the first crime-fighting superhero of the world, predate Superman, Batman and all those other guys that came later. He had powers. He could sort of stand there, do this and make people see what he wanted them to see. He had hypnotic powers, he had a cube, perhaps very similar to the Marvel, the cube, right? Because he could use that cube to increase his powers and communicate not just within the Earth but across galaxies, okay? Most of our imagination or our expectation of the word magic like it or not comes from popular fiction, right? Mom's magician, the wonderful works of Enid Blyton that's just one of the covers and she's written so many books which enchant children into believing that if you sit on a chair it's going to take you wherever you want, right? A wishing chair and things like that. The series by Homburg and the wonderful series by 2D Canavan are some of the recent ones. If nothing, we at least know this, right? So this would connect to at least the current generation in a sense. Even that is I think 10 years old now, right? Or how much? 20 years? 20 years. I'm too old, yeah, sorry. So, yeah, Harry Potter came from books, went on to the movies. So again, the imagery of magic, of how we see magic happen. And if not that, me, right? I kept this for a reason today, right? So that I look like Dr. Strange. So yeah, Dr. Strange, again, created much after Mandrake or Zatara for that matter. But then Zatara is a Mandrake equivalent that comes from the DC side. Zatara is more famous for given reasons. And Dr. Strange is the Marvel equivalent of it. And there's a lot of parallels between the stories or the powers and other things that you see between these characters and how all this helps people believe in it. But now let me take you a little back into what magic really is. A recent book that was released by Tas Chin, I think came out in the mid-2000s, 2006, 2007, was called Magic. And it chronicles magic from 1400s to 1950s. It's a fantastic book, it's like this big, it's 8 kilos. I know because I had to carry it as an luggage from the US because that was the only way I could carry it without paying. Because it's a book, right? You can carry a book in your hand, you're not charged for it. So somebody at the gate said, why is your bag so heavy? I have a book in it. He said, take it in the hand. I said, awesome. 8 kilos. Yeah, okay. But it's brilliant because it chronicles magic from the 1400s. So that's like 600 years of history of magic, huge pictures, lithographs, and wonderful articles in it by Ricky Jay, Jim Steinmeier, and others who are famous in the magic community and much of the US. But magic doesn't date there. Because when you say 1400s, it actually is 1400s because this painting by Bosch called The Conjurer is estimated to have been drawn around 1475 to 1480. And if you sort of see, it shows you what is the classic of magic, the cups and balls. In one of the future sessions, we will sort of get into breaking down some of these effects and try to understand, I'm not here to teach you the secrets of magic, right? But primarily break this down and understand why these are classics and why we should appreciate them slightly more, not just from the enjoyment point, but also in terms of the effort that's required to perform some of this. Very interesting. Magicians have always been linked to pickpockets and other things because every time in India, we must have this generation slightly difficult, but when I was small, I was going to say young, there used to be these street magicians that used to come back in Odupi. On one of these street sides, road sides, they would start sitting down on the street and start performing, right? And then people would sort of, and we would also all go and start trying to see what they were doing, they would perform for like half an hour, the point was to hustle in a sense, right? And sort of get people involved, I mean the kind of things that it was brilliant, they would like get a kid gory, get a kid cut their own kid, cut his tongue off, show the tongue and then sort of put it back again, right? Indian traditional magic is very, what's called bizarre magic or gory in a sense. And then they would put the kid in a bag and then put it in a small box. It's all on the ground, it's an open ground, so there's no concept of a trap door and stage and things like that, no lighting, the sun is the lighting, right? And people all around it, standing all around, completely around, looking at this guy from a vantage point, which is why Indian traditional magic is so far superior to whatever we now do because what we do is pretty much western magic because we are on a stage, Indian magic doesn't quite transcend or translate to the stage. So the cups and balls has its own Indian version, which we will get to in a bit, but yeah, so this is just putting dates on it, 1475, but that's not sort of... So okay, so the first book on magic, the first book on magic was Discovery of Witchcraft, this was 1584 by Reginald Scott. I have reprints of these, right? I mean they've recently reproduced this or almost looking like the originals, very nice. And you go through this, this is the first book on magic and look at it, it is exposing magic. The first published book on magic for the public essentially tells people there is no such thing as magic. Why? Because the book was written to expose the so-called warlocks and witches and sorcerers and psychics and mediums, which we still are fighting now, right? After 600 years. That was the whole intent of this. This is not just in the US, if you sort of looked at the German side of things, they also had their own book in 1798 called the Natural Magic Book, which showed you how to put an arrow through your head, you can sort of see how it's done at the top, a sword through the stomach, we've all done this back in school and other things, right? Where you have sort of something, theater guys would mostly have used some things, but again, I feel it's extremely sad that some of the first books on magic essentially told people, there's no such thing as magic. But let's go back some more because we are still talking 1400s. Let's go back to 2500 BC to the tomb of Benihassen where you see this imagery in that tomb. 2500 years back, we are in 2000 AD right now. That's 4500 years back where this effect or this imagery is largely looked on as a depiction of cups and balls, okay? There are others who say this is making bread. So there's both perspectives to it, okay? But if we actually go even further back, we go about 5000 years back and we go to the 18th to 16th century, there was something called the West Carpapiras which is actually the first published book or collection of handwritten literature which writes and you can sort of do a search for this, Dedi, the magician's name was Dedi. He performed in the court of Cheops, the pharaoh who built the pyramids, right? So there is a complete, these imagery are new clearly, people have drawn this out now, but there is a detailed account of the performance of Dedi in the court of Cheops. One of the effects, let me sort of tell you, so it describes this. Dedi came to the court, everybody was watching him and he had a duck with him. So he brought the duck and the duck was walking around, he catches the duck and he sort of brings the head off the duck. Okay, so he cuts the head off the duck and lets the duck, the head is off, decapitation and then moments later he actually takes the head and pops it back on and the duck walks off, fine. Okay, and a lot of other effects are in detail written under, called Tales of Magicians. Again, 5,000 years back, so pretty, pretty fascinating. India, we had our own contribution. So this is your traditional Indian street magicians. This imagery is from 1888, called the celebrated mango tree trick. Anybody here have seen the Indian mango tree? Yes, yes. So I had the occasion and there are still very few, perhaps a handful of performers in India, street performers in India who actually do this and do this very, very well, because the setting is the same as I said, they do it in open ground, you are all around them, nothing for them to hide and stuff. So they sort of start with a seed and so they take you through the whole process of seed to tree to the mango fruit in a matter of 20, 25 minutes. You actually see them plant the seed, put some water, talk to you, and then they cover it, they take it off and there's a small sapling, they take it off and then there's slightly bigger, they cover it, take it off, and now it's full like a bush and after a moment you see that there's a mango and they call somebody, this mango is right here, right? It's not like stuck by glue or something and people say, no, it is real and then they take it off and give and the guy goes back with a real mango. The last time I saw this was in Trivandrum at All India Magic Get Together and it was not the mango season and I'm like, so, I mean the planning, I'm not saying he produced it from somewhere because magic can't create something, right? While we do show you that we break the laws of physics, we are using other laws of physics or geometry or some other law to create that illusion for you, right? Oh by the way, when I say illusion, when you are mass hypnotized? No, illusion means it's an illusion for us, it's an industry terminology. If you see somebody cut on stage and half they are being cut in half on stage. Now how, that's a different topic, right? But it is not a lot of people walk up later and sort of say, so that was hypnosis. No, okay. So, but coming back to this effect this is the basket trick I was talking about earlier. The terminology of Indian magic itself, all the foreign magic are referred to as magic. All Indian effects are referred to as trick, the mango tree trick, the Indian basket trick, the great Indian rope trick. The great Indian rope trick was a construct that is a session by itself was a legend came out because of the original fake news, okay? A friend of mine, Dr. Peter Lamont did his very nice book called The Rise and Fall of the Indian Rope Trick where he actually traces back the genealogy of the Indian Rope Trick and finally leads to a 1940 newspaper, a gadget in New York that published this story about this guy coming to India and watching it. It was just make-believe. But it went viral. It was the first instant of something going viral. It went so viral that every book, every magazine newspaper at that time carried it. And when they later put a rejoinder saying this was not true, nobody bothered. Right? And what did it do? It had magicians from across the west coming to India saying, I want to see the Indian Rope Trick and the Indian magicians go, yeah, yeah, I can show. What is that? We will show. Give us some time. And so this was one of the performances of the Indian Rope Trick by the great Karachi. He was an Australian. Nothing to do with India. But then it helped because this imagery that people had in their minds which was you have a rope, a rope stand straight, a child is called. The child climbs up and disappears into the clouds. Jack and the beanstalk. And then you go and say, call him. Come, come, he doesn't want to come down. So the magician now takes a sword and walks up. And then there's some noise and then limbs fall down from the clouds. The magician comes back, picks all that, puts it in that box you saw earlier. Yeah? And so here's the box. Yeah, yeah, this box. So he puts all those things into that box and opens the box and the kid walks out again and claps and the ropes fall down. Right? So this was the description of the effect in that gadget. And in 2000, yeah, 2000, Udupi, where I am from had an international magic convention where a Delhi magician, a Delhi street magician called Isha Muddin performed the Indian rope trick. People like Richard Wiseman, Dr. Peter Lamont came down. They were good friends by then. To watch this and chronicle it, of course, the kid just climbed up and came back down and the rope collapsed. That's about it, right? But still, to do it in pretty much closer to the real story as rather the fake story that had appeared was a great achievement for magic. So, yeah. So that's the Indian rope trick. Now, why am I telling all this? It all links back to the wonderful quote by Arthur C. Clarke, a very good magician himself who said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. A most often used quote, the third law and pretty much, you know, has been written about, has been said to be untrue. That's not what he meant, etc. But for now, let's use it as its face value and look at any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Now, look at all that the stories we talked about. At some level, every magician from DiDi to Karachi, to the unnamed Indian performers who went in front of people and performed what they did were using science or technology of the day in unique ways in ways where people who were scientists would not relate back to it and sort of would see it as being paranormal or supernatural. Exhibit A. We're talking of automatons now. A.I. The first A.I. was in 1770s. This is called the Great Turk. The Great Turk made its first appearance in 1770. It lived on for almost 100 years and it was this box which had a mannequin the mannequin mode. I have seen a later version of this in one of the magic museums and these were the workings of it that you could sort of see through so that like you see the box they show the box, they close the box and now you sit against Deep Blue came much later you sit against this machine and the machine starts playing chess and the machine defeated everybody it played with so much so that at that time Napoleon himself played it and Napoleon the story goes tried to cheat. The third time he cheated it just swapped all the pawns away. Of course as you can sort of see from the courtesy the Turk has opposed chess playing Robert was a hoax that started an early trend blah blah blah right but this is the point that magicians have always found ways of creating things, of trying to show that technology exists when it does not or to use technology in ways that people can't quite fathom or explain. Eugene Robert Houdan considered as the father of modern magic most of modern magic you see which is the stage based thing where you know magician is wearing a suit hat or not today because was him he was the first stage modern stage magician he created something called the enchanted orange tree see it's not orange tree trick the enchanted orange tree it was a mechanical version of exactly doing what the Indian street performers were doing which was the mango tree trick and here he was essentially he had this he had a box from which a plant would grow and from that plant you would sort of see flowers blooming and then you would see orange and sort of you could pluck the orange right nobody could eat it that's different but till that point and then you had these flying silk sort of a handkerchief that would be flown by butterflies you had various kind of things now what was fantastic was he was a brilliant clock worker so most of the magic he did had a relation to clock work watch watchmaker right so a lot of this was robots in that sense right not powered by electricity but by clanks and levers and things like that so this is called a light and heavy chest so in 1850s again once he had sort of retired from stage performance he was requested by the king of France or something like that to actually make a trip to the Middle East because they were just sort of making the western civilization was making inroads into the Middle East and so they sent Prabhupadaan to make the people there believe that western civilization is far far advanced and our skills and magic etc is far advanced so what he did was this he called all the all the chieftains all the tribe leaders and the strongest men of the tribe and he had this small trunk with him that he brought and kept it down to the person and he asked him to pick it up the person was able to easily pick it up he said keep it down again and he said now look at me and I am going to strip you of all your powers now pick it up and now what you are seeing is that scene no matter what he could do he could not pick up that same light box that was there the back story electromagnets had made their appearance in the western civilization so that was used so intelligently and used to create this wonderful illusion of a box or rather a person being stripped of his powers of all his strength and the concept of my god better than your god my society better than your society right that scene is sort of immortalized in this movie the illusionist there is one also there is this other scene where he takes the sword and he puts it on the stage and he walks off and he asks the prince to come and lift it and for all the life of the prince he can't move that sword and in the movie they actually show that somebody is operating a crank which operates a electromagnet I love the illusionist because the most of the magic that they show is actually performable and it's such a brilliant way of denoting what magic can do and the wonderful thing that a magician thinks four steps ahead for people who have not seen the movie I just sort of spoiled it for you and so magicians have always been fascinated with dreams magicians have been fascinated with breaking every rule that we believe in sort of breaking the laws of science one of the classic I mean copper field himself has done immense effects like walking through the great wall of china and things like that but what really got him world acclaimed was flying because he was the first human in that sense a magician of course to literally fly without seemingly with any kind of support he would literally get somebody from the audience hold them and then float around the stage I had the occasion of watching it it's unbelievable it's like even as a magician even if you sort of understand what are the philosophies and what are the tricks you can use it's still like you want to believe when you watch something like this you want to believe that magic is real you can watch it on youtube so you just go on and search David copper field flying you will get to watch that dynamo is walking on water the Thames river it's classic by the way right now I think Patanjali or somebody is posting some videos like this sorry no who was that so we are right now I am digressing but we are sort of having people blindfold themselves and be able to read probably a recent thing was that you do yoga and you can sort of levitate on water right so we are like yeah right watch this video and then we can talk so yeah but again this brings to life one of the greatest imagery that is in all our epics we had in all epics people walking on the sea or river or water whatever that is and that's what the magician is making come true oh by the way today morning I saw just now I saw this video of the Ram se too it's sort of going viral again for whatever reason and my comment was hey great place to go and perform that effect because if that is there just about the site I can you know possibly but again it's about breaking rules because Blaine performed wonderful effects of standing on a pillow and then sitting in a box not eating for 48 days and things like that but this recent thing that he did was a bullet catch which has been performed so many times in the past the larger there was a magician called Chang Ling Soo who died on stage performing this his real name was David Williams son I might get the second name wrong but he performed this recently where he took technology to such a level where he is essentially saying see you can see that's in the mouth aimed at the mouth you are sort of seeing the bullet or the light of the bullet and things like that and and the back story is that he almost killed himself performing this so but but again like that's what magicians want to do they want to break rules of science by using other modes of science and nothing better than Michael Jackson to me one of the greatest magicians we have had telling us why he loves to create magic to put something together that's so unusual so unexpected that it blows people's heads off something ahead of the times five steps ahead of what people are thinking think back to the illusionist so this is a friend of mine Derek Delgaudio he is right now performing a show in New York I think this was supposed to be the last week I am not sure because if the show was supposed to be a two week show it's gone on for six months now and the show is produced by Neil Patrick Harris directed by Frank Oz Yoda but why I put this was this it says wonder is a rare commodity these days beautiful tender astonishing why is wonder so rare today because I recently not so recently but five years back was performing an event for SAP in Bombay and I just finished my act and stepped off the guy sitting in the front seat and Israeli walked up to me said wonderful show I said thank you he said no no no I mean it wonderful because I just checked you out and I couldn't find out how you did what you did guys I am not talking five minutes later I am not talking ten minutes later I have just taken one step off the stage so person I am not sure if she is already googling me but essentially that is how our audiences are today you see something earlier you would go back think over it ponder about it you now go to google or generally and type how this was done and you like it or not hopefully not you get to see some version of how that can be performed that is why wonder is not there and so what Derek did is one of the finest performers and what Derek did essentially is create this very intimate show where everything is so unexplainable at the end of the show you really go back saying was I even at the show did that even happen and in today's age so why am I again talking about all this because we are in a age where magic is all around us this was the or rather is the chimera wand the chimera wand is a universal remote of sorts it's shaped like a magic wand you can program it to I think 30 when it launched to about 30 different devices you could set up your own gestures you could be Harry Potter and go chain channel now right that's there it's available for anybody who wants to spend 60 dollars or 80 I don't remember but and then we are talking of everything being controlled with either small gadgets on us or even not kinetics and other things where everything is either the TV interacts with us much more and we interact with it so this is what our audiences are getting used to gesture I don't want to watch this channel do this it shifts over to another channel is a very simple example but again this is what an audience is people are people are experiencing day in and day out especially with you guys it's much more than that to work with technology so your expectation of what or your knowledge of what technology can do or your expectation of what technology can do is is much much higher which is why I love it's not that any sufficiently advanced technology is magic it is that any technology taking place beyond the threshold of our senses is let me try and explain this quote recently saw a video that went viral of a drone a drone that the person stood and controlled with gestures I'm sure everybody has seen it he did this it went wherever he went it followed him and things like that now these are things that exist and these are things that exist that are known in the public domain so the moment I as an individual know that something like this exists my expectation of what kind of technological acts are possible is much more than that so it doesn't really matter whether that technology exists or not because if I stand here now and I wake that person up and I say hey hi stand up I'm gonna read your mind and I read the mind you most probably gonna get an answer that says okay you google me right if or if I ask somebody to say write something or read something it's most probably gonna be like yeah wifi bluetooth technologies exist so I know you got whatever I you know so it becomes pretty difficult so I mean my recent example for this is imagine somebody comes on stage levitates turns around or I right now turn around and vanish half of you are gonna go and say hey where did you get the 3D projection from right so that's now it's not about whether 3D projection is at that level today but we know 3D projection is available and so that must be 3D projection come on we had our prime minister appearing everywhere right so surely it's possible right now we are wearing at least two or three of these devices on us right and this is what we are used to with us or people around us and we know the capabilities of these devices and so as a performer as a magician it is not anymore enough to think of using technology before others can use it like the electromagnet and things like that that's out and it's also not enough to use technology in unique weird ways that perhaps still mystify and astound people because people's expectations are way different and so whatever we do it sort of goes to people have their own meanings or reasons why that magic happen so all in all it makes an interesting age to be performing magic as is the true with most performing arts today right I'm really thankful that so many people turned up for this here in person and I'm hoping some more are watching but it's very difficult nowadays to actually step out and go to a place to watch an event whether it's paid free whatever that is because it's so much easier to open our phones and look at world class world's best content right there it's not about just watching anything it's now I might be the best in the area or I might be the best in the country or I might be the best available at that point in time which is good till very recently but now not anymore because you can on your laptops or on the TVs or on the fire sticks or whatever that is perhaps holographic projections watch any act that you want so it makes it all the more challenging to sort of perform show something so it brings this whole question of where is magic headed because magic has like I said at a various to a great extent as you saw in the slides been ahead of technology then there was a phase where magicians just started using technology in unique ways mixing two or three things and trying to sort of show that hey we are different but now this whole thing of how are we going to even look at how do we entertain somebody and mistify them at the same time so that's my last slide so I thought I don't have an answer for that yet but I thought if I was trying to do that and for today because it's a it's a tech crowd I would really go completely basic I would perhaps go perhaps not 5000 years but sort of as back as I can to try and to try and do something which clearly cannot have any technological connects and so can only have real magical connects yeah can I ask you to join me I'm not cool that was not planned today so don't worry I didn't find I asked them about the tables the tables wouldn't support otherwise I would have done that I'm kidding sit down so I'm going to give you an experience that you have never experienced before okay perhaps that's what I was yeah so if you can just switch that off for a moment that's already an experience he's never gone through before because he's sitting down in front of a bunch of people with light a projector light being shot at him no doesn't work okay okay so I need yes so I have two ticks choose one what's your name Frithyraj do you want to change your mind sure that's the one you want you can change your mind if you want okay I told you Prithviraj that I'm going to give you an experience you've never had before I think I just did because I walked up to you with a fancy looking box which normally holds a 4GB drive opened it and offered a set of two ticks so you can choose one you did then I upped it by asking you to change your mind has anybody ever done this to you I deliver what I promise guys now I am going to up that by one an experience you've never ever had before sign the toothpick so that if you know where this is headed so if you ever sign sign it okay so if you ever see that again you would remember it or you would recognize it to some extent you want to change your mind with some other toothpick at this point so again have you ever taken a toothpick and signed it no we'll up that can I take that for a minute I'm just going to place that there can I ask you to hold your hands out like this and what I want you to do is slightly apart the hands perfect I am going to take your signed toothpick and I'm going to keep it inside like that hold on to it so that in a moment I can give that to you like this feel through it can you feel it just hold it with two hands like that have you ever done this before break it sure yes thank you have you ever broken a toothpick in this manner okay good because then my whole idea would fall flat hold onto your hand like this keep your other hand on top like this now I actually should have worn this I forgot I meant to change that's okay are you a doctor strange fan works works right works so do you know what this is some pendant it's the eye of Agamotto the eye of Agamotto helps change change time if you hold your hand like this I'm going to try turning back time I don't know if you notice but I kept track exactly of when you broke the toothpick now I'm going to this is tricky because if I turn back time too much then the toothpick won't be signed I think that would work thank you very much I'm sure you had an experience that you never ever had before right thank you very much guys okay okay hard audience let's sort of take this hand hold it hold it here like this together now here's the thing if I managed to get into my doctor strange guys and turn back time to that specific moment where it was before he broke the toothpick it would be intact if it was slightly later it would still be broken you get that right or if it goes slightly more back it would not be signed you can now take that back frame it thank you very much thank you so yeah guys that's what I had for you today but thank you very much question is after my last slide no it's already projected there so it doesn't matter so yeah the last slide basically just says keep calm and make magic so thanks a lot it was a pleasure talking to you running you through what I see as as interesting snippets of the history of magic and we will sort of keep going forward with some more interesting aspects of the different types of magic and theories of magic and things like that but yeah thanks for being such a awesome audience and for enjoying it thank you very much and thank you for everybody watching thank you yes how sorry next talk yeah quick answers I can give now yes quick answer I am a believer not at him I am a believer in aspects of the supernatural and I am a believer in the concept of the creator and god and things like that but till now everybody I have met or have come very close to meeting have turned out to be fake so I am on the lookout for finally meeting somebody who I clearly say I will become your follower right but I have had very close contact with both the ashrams that are around Bangalore recently where I essentially said that I will come in if what you do is I see as real I am going to proclaim that it is real but if not I am going to go out and tell people exactly how you pull whatever it is from where it is you mean ok no I concentrated specifically with the stage magic and completely kept away as much as possible from religious and even fantasy for that matter only initially while I sort of touched upon the harry potters and others of the world I did not get into that that thread thanks you were wonderful then yes so one of the key the advice was that one of them was really good at show magic so how important do you think show magic is how do you cultivate your skills in that aspect to me magic is 5% secrets 95% presentation yes that 5% is very important it's like saying if I don't know the ABC of code I won't be able to do anything after that right so it's like that if that 5% if I don't know the basics of swimming I am going to sink no matter what presentation I do around it right so people are going to catch me they would know what I did and things like that and if as you know I have a book out called the smart course in magic and if you are trying to plug that book but which is always good but if you just see what I did with him would be one of the most basic effects in magic but I believe the presentation I put onto it brought it to a level of miracle so there is no such thing as a bad magic or a basic magic there are of course easy magic as easy in terms of easy in reach easy in learning or when you get to learn it as a young kid perhaps you get to learn it but I completely think that what takes you where you are in magic is completely the presentation which was sort of the message of prestige and illusionist is all about that this guy is a brilliant brilliant performer what is being mentioned oh yeah I realize that when the illusionist slide came up and I just sort of slipped my mind I had meant to put the slide in but yeah those are two wonderful movies of course after that you have had now you see me that has come up which also looks at various elements of magic like they have a mentalist I in my shows play a mentalist in certain ways in life I'm a mentalist not so much a magician anymore but yeah but that whole thing of to me that's what I was actually hinting at when I was saying I like the prestige I like the illusionist better I forgot to say prestige at that point because to me the prestige went completely into fantasy and sci-fi at a certain point of the movie with the illusionist you think throughout his fantasy but then comes back being no this guy was absolutely doing chess play the magician I seem to have missed that so tweet at me once you find out I have not seen either of them so I I don't know