Magic flouts convention, makes learning fun
By Sudeshna Chatterjee
The
Indian Express
May 02, 2000
Mumbai, May 1: Imagine magic as anything more than
entertainment? Magician Nakul Shenoy (22), a research student from Karnataka
has, after a two-year study on audience perception of messages communicated
through magic, pointed out that magic enters the realm of education as
well, and in a big way too.
"A majority of the subjects believed magic performs the twin functions
of entertainment (78%) and education (67%)," Shenoy stressed at a three
day magic convention organised by the City-based Society of Indian Magicians
(SIM) that concluded on Sunday.
"There is a magician in Taiwan who uses magic tricks to teach English
language to children. We had successfully used magic here as part of an
election awareness campaign," said Shenoy, who is secretary of the Magic
& Allied Arts Development & Research Institute, Udupi, Karnataka.
Sure about the effectiveness of magic in building up social awareness
about different issues, Shenoy, also an MS student in Communication at
the Manipal Institute of Communications, Karnataka, highlighted the preliminary
findings of a research on a hundred subjects which "showed thatbthe spectators
not only understood the trick and the message, but remembered it too.
There are magicians who have changed their entire show to suit the requirements
of one message - be it for AIDS awareness or drug prevention," he said.
In mid-May, Shenoy said, they would launch a portal on magic and magicians
in India called www.indianmagique.org. The portal, he added, would have
a directory of magicians and articles aimed at providing assistance to
magicians with reference to presentation, answer queries or discuss ideas
with magicians, building routines or acts, or even buying a particular
trick or illusion.
The SIM convention, the fourth in the more than 60-year-old history of
the society, also had a lecture-cum-demonstration by magician Meenakshi
Sundaram on using chemical ingredients for magic. He said use of such
ingredients explained "water changing to milk, the vanishing of whisky
or simply the vanishing of a colour."
[Reproduced from the Indian Express dated May 02, 2000.
Click for original
article.]
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