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 that the spectators not only understood the trick and the message, but remembered it too".