My friend Susam and me just got back from a performance by Nakul Shenoy. The performance reminded me of an entry that I had made in my log book when I was in college. It has been reproduced here.
12 - December - 2005 8:49 AM
… Last week, for the first time in my life, I saw a snake charmer. He was at Lenavilaku and I was walking there to have my breakfast. There was a small crowd around him and he had two well grown cobras with him. The snake charmer was an entertainer, a snake handler, a psychiatrist and a spiritualist. At each stage, he filtered out people and brought the chosen ones closer to him. (I stood there amazed at his performance.) His talk was well oiled and polished and highly convincing to the unprepared mind.
His statements were of the form: “I want you to do X not because of Y but because of Z.” X could be giving out money or believing in the powers of a stick that he claimed had magical powers.
He was a psychoanalyst of the best sorts. He looked at a frail young man and said, “You have been cheated by close ones.” He said to an old guy, “You have not seen the fruits of your hands.” To a well dressed man with glasses on, “You are expecting a promotion soon!” And there people actually believed him!!
He was absolutely amazing. His performance and his talk was smooth. I wanted to give him some money - not because I believed in him but for his skill and to feed the snakes. Assuming he visits three villages each work day and works for four days in a week, consider this: He earned Rs. 250 in the single hour he spent at Lenavilaku.
Susam was very interested to take part in one of the acts. When the final act was on, he put his hand up when Nakul wanted someone on the stage. He saw Susam with his hand up and called him up to the stage saying, “You have been calling out ‘Nakul’ for a long time”. He asked Susam to pick a book from a stack of four. He then asked him to turn to a random page and focus on the first word of the page. He later correctly guesses that the word was “I”.
The believers will believe and the skeptics will be skeptical. First of all, Susam did not focus on the first word but rather the second word which was “could”. Secondly, the real psychic would have been able to read the mind from a really random book, like one of the two SCIAM magazines that were in my bag, open to a random page and then try and find the word. I wonder whether he would have been able to get either “Large Hadron Collider” or “Solar Farms” correctly. Thirdly, Susam was not calling out his name for a long time. In fact, he never raised his voice during the entire show.
Having said that, I must say that it was a brillaint performance by Nakul the “psychic”, corporate version of the the low cost rural version of 2005. I wish Susam had lied or turned the page when Nakul had his back to him.
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