BANGALORE: February 14th is celebrated all over as Valentines Day, but for our members it was just another chance to profess their love for magic. As with every month, The Bangalore Ring met via Zoom to discuss, perform, and exchange thoughts on Magic. This meeting was well attended by our members from all over India and one from the USA.
As has been a tradition now, the meeting started with our young guest performers Master Ishaan Shenoy and Master Inesh Shenoy kicking off the trick session. Ishaan had a volunteer pick a card after shuffling a pack and choosing one of the halves. He then asked the volunteer to take the pack behind his back, and move a few cards up and down the deck without looking. When the pack was spread a moment later it emerged that the spectator had mysteriously managed to place one of the cards (a face up one at that) right next to his chosen card! Inesh followed his twin with an adept presentation of Triumph, all to pose a question to the gathered magicians: “How do I appear the four aces at the end of this routine?” A few ideas were collected, and he has promised to work on his solution before the next meeting.
Kumaran Anandan, who joined from Chennai, took the stage next and amazed us with a wonderful divination of a card he was randomly stopped at. He then queried the group to their ideas on how the effect was performed. The resulting conversation threw up a lot of good ideas that can be used, but nothing was as simple and direct as the method that Kumaran had employed. Best of all, it made perfect sense for a Zoom show, such as our meeting was.
Shameer Salim, who was joining from the US, then flummoxed us with his take on the ACAAN: a simple direct effect where any card named is found at a specific pre-defined number. Again the theories that abounded in the open session to how this could be achieved was fantastic, but not as simple and direct as the method employed by Shameer.
Abhilash Purohit took this as the perfect stage to share an interesting app that he had originally built to help kids learn coding, which had since turned magical. Using what seemed like a children’s memory app, he demonstrated the uncanny ability of a spectator to be seen as psychic! While the effect was powerful in its own way, members weighed in with ideas on how the impact could be further improved — which was to everybody’s advantage.
It was now Nakul Shenoy’s turn to perform and share a couple of effects that have become his go-to for online performances. He showed how a randomly chosen card was in fact always facing us on the wall behind him. He also shared a couple of his favourite forces and the nuances of the handlings that made them most natural. To top it all, Nakul shared how he had recently joined the new audio-only social media platform called ClubHouse and ended up performing what may well be one of the first magic shows there.
On February 7th, he had hosted an open Q&A on Magic and Magicians, but when the dozen odd people that joined did not have many questions, Nakul had to switch to performing some of his favourite radio and long-distance magic effects — ending up with almost 40 minutes of unplanned audio-only performance. The learnings from this would fill a chapter!
Others who attended the February meeting included Karthik Rao, Soumyabrata Banerjee, and Subramanian Cholayil. Before calling the monthly meeting to a close, the members decided to hold a special jam session within the next couple of weeks on the topic of Cups and Balls. With in-ring resources like Shankar Junior, Raja Moorthy, Prahlad Acharya, and David Nobo, this promises to be one heck of a jam session. We will tell you all about it in the next issue. Stay tuned!
The Bangalore Ring 