The Force was in Full Flow, even if May the Ninth

BANGALORE, MAY 12: The Bangalore Ring met on the 9^th of May for our monthly meeting via Zoom, as has been the norm since early last year. This meeting was well attended by our members and magician guests, and saw a lot of performances and discussions related to magic. 

The meeting began at 10 sharp and was called to order by our Ring Secretary Nakul Shenoy. He took the opportunity to welcome everybody, introduce our new members, and apprise everybody with news of the upcoming annual magic convention of the IBM. Our member Dibya Guha has been contributing many of his effects to numerous magic magazines, including the Linking Ring. The members congratulated Dibya on his recent publications, and discussed a few of the effects. 

The trick session began with Master Ishaan Shenoy performing his take on the impossible prediction over zoom. A card selected from a shuffled pack by a distant volunteer over zoom, was correctly identified by young Ishaan. He was followed by his twin, Master Inesh Shenoy who entertained everybody with a rendition of “your card at your number”. 

With the iTwins kicking off the trick session in style, all the members joined in with performances making this one of the best trick sessions ever. Kumaran Anandan presented an interesting take on twisting palm illusion, and everybody discussed the ways in which this could be presented over zoom. Our Ring Treasurer, Karthik Rao came next and showed how he could still divine a freely selected card, whether the volunteer lied or told the truth. 

Prahlad Saldanha, a friend of the Ring, who had joined us for the first time during these zoom sessions, performed a fascinating Triumph effect over zoom. Our star contributor, Dibya Guha took the screen and performed what he called was “a special trick for IBM Ring 177”. The meaning  of those words were evident to the group only when at the end of the effect the words, “IBM”, “Ring”, and “177” appeared on three hitherto blank cards.  Dibya followed this with a wonderful Kings & Queens transposition effect. 

Our resident tech guru and creator of a number of top magic apps, including Hydra, Shameer Salim took over the screen and performed an effect where a series of freely made choices were found to have been in our inbox for days! He was kind enough to share his thinking of making tech magic work for the audiences. 

One of our past members and top illusionist, Kuddroli Ganesh had joined the meeting from Mangalore and shared a couple of performance clips with the gathering. One was an beautifully choreographed Triumph like card act, while the second was a mind reading with music effect that Ganesh had performed in the local (Kannada) version of Big Boss. Ganesh who is an accomplished flute player, demonstrated how magic and music was combined by him to make this act entertaining and memorable for the Big Boss contestants, and of course all those watching from their homes.

The mind reading effect inspired Nakul Shenoy to perform next, and he warmed up with a routine of invisible dice. The values of two imaginary dice thrown by Dibya were easily divined by Nakul. He followed this with another mind reading act where he metaphorically brought the Hitchhikers Guide in contact with the Matrix, or at least a matrix of numbers and a freely derived number led the audience to the crux of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Mind reading was in the air now, and our traditional magic specialist Subramanian Cholayil performed a fun trick where he divined a card merely thought of by Shameer. It was now the turn of Shreyas Vemenchery to perform an entertaining version of “card finding nose”. This ended with a neat surprise at the end when one card found by the nose, transformed into another – being the chosen card. The trick session was brought to a fitting close by our Sergeant At Arms, Unusualist AJ who performed and then shared his “Side Buckle Control”. 

This was followed by a discussion on motley topics involving magic, and especially magic in the pandemic. Others that attended the meeting included Illusionist Clifford, Srikanth VC, and Saurav Mohanty. The meeting was called to a close at the end of two and half hours, but with the promise of meeting for a special session on 30^th May. The members look forward to catching up at this additional session in two weeks.