Revels Day 0- The Psychological Illusionist

How much can you really tell about somebody from a single meeting?

Their spirit animal, their ethnicity, favoured emojis perhaps?
On Day Zero of Revels 2017, the MIT Quadrangle was graced by a highly eclectic persona- a magician, hypnotist, mind-reader and psychological illusionist- all in one.
Karan Singh, India’s leading Illusionist and uber-cool YouTube personality teleported us all into the enigmatic world of mind-reading and deception, all while remaining entirely unperturbed by all the exhilaration emanating from the crowd. With his dynamic stage presence and rich baritone, the crowd was assured of an exuberant experience.

Revels 2017 got off to a scintillating start, with the director, executive board, faculty and core committee burgeoning the event in their characteristic alacrity and jovial manner.

The Cultural Secretary, Vidushee Singh had some very influential words to say, rewinding back to her very first performance back in Revels 2015. She said the stage had been set with an aura that really drew you in and inspired you to perform, and is the reason she has now returned as a convener in Revels.

Organizing an event of such magnanimous proportions doesn’t come about in the course of a day. Cultural Secretary Pashang Lavangia mentioned how the wheels started rolling months ago, driven by over 200 core committee members, 600 organizers and 1000 volunteers.

The hosts of the evening, Shaurya Agarwal and Avani Jain kick-started the Carnaval by  inviting onto stage the mentalist who proceeded to leave both the skeptics’ and the believers’ minds jitterbugging.
As if to lend a taste of his influential power,  preceding his entry, a notice flashed across the screen. It read, “This isn’t a show for you if you’re easily offended. Or the RSS.”
Spontaneous, witty and all of 25, Karan Singh left us thoroughly spellbound as he uncovered the mysteries proffered by the human brain.
Starting with the faculty, he requested them to remove their wallets and extricate either a credit or debit card. Then, he asked them to scream the very first digit of their credit card number to him, albeit in their heads.
“You have got to be loud though, it’s not like I’m a mind reader”.
He then immaculately announced a sequence of digits that happened to match those of the credit cards in question, much to the amazement of the spectators.

Here was a man who combined magic, misdirection, psychology and histrionics to achieve the seemingly impossible. He also threw in some witty quips in his act, insinuating that the ABCD of India essentially is: Astrology, Bollywood, Cricket and Dance. While some conjectured on his mastery of neuro-linguistic programming, other believed he may possess genuine psychic abilities. One thing, however is certain: whatever he does, he’s damn good at it.

For his next trick, he called upon a volunteer that didn’t believe in horoscopes. As per his instructions, she held out her hand and wrote her birth date on a sheet. He then asked her to think of her starsign, and believe that the present day is her birthday. She was requested to answer the following questions as honestly as she possibly could:
1. Do you sing in the shower?
2. A train is about to kill 10 people. You have a button that will switch tracks and save the 10 people, but run over a 5 year old girl. Would you press the button?
3. Would you kill your best friend for 1 crore rupees?
4. Have you ever taken somebody’s phone and read their chats?


Karan Singh was first intrigued by the idea of magic when he was 11, and was immediately hooked.
He confessed his reason to master the art of mind-tricks was primarily to impress his crush at the time, Priyanka Das. On a particular day, one of his classmates named Anant Rao asked him to guess what card he had selected out of all the 52 in a deck. Naturally, he was unable to figure it out, and the humiliation sparked in him a relentless quest for the answer. Years later, he has now figured out how to guess what card has been selected using nothing but his cognitive faculties. Can a reasonable individual be coerced to manipulate their own arbitration at the command of another? Karan Singh proved that it most certainly can.

He called upon two volunteers, and got one to pick a number from 1 to 52. He got the second volunteer to pick ether a black or red card of their choice, and then placed the deck of cards in the hands of the volunteer.
” If the 42nd card turns out to be a queen of clubs, everybody go insane”.
Location and behold, insane they went.

Multiple other acts involved the great illusionist deducing a random audience member’s first crush’s name and a terrifying twist on Russian Roulet that had actually been banned in a couple of countries all being executed flawlessly.

He spoke of a resolution he had made years ago, to look at people dead in the eye and figure out their ATM PIN. He locked himself in a room for three months to figure out how he would go about this, but then he deciphered his father’s, which was 2010- his mother’s birthday.
His father, who is soft-spoken, well-articulated and socially awkward, and not a quintessential Sardar was naturally appalled and underwent a drastic transition in demeanour, using certain euphemisms not to be discussed in a public scenario. It was here that he realized the significance people place on their ATM pins as compared to other various passwords.

For his final act, Karan Singh mesmerized the crowd with his fluid style and excitable instinct. In a random quest, he garnered numerics such as his birthdate, a certain spectator’s birthdate and a Ransom number less than 25,000.
Compiling and summing-up all the answers, he revealed a scroll which bore the same value as that pronounced by the calculation. What’s more, the peak astonishment was that the number was 170317, the present date of the event.
His Facebook bio has described himself best, iterating that ‘he is but an illusion’.
It was a perplexing night, where we couldn’t help but be in awe of his skills even as we attempted to fathom how he did it.
With such a glorious start to the fest, the coming days featuring top-notch comedians and ebullient artists promise to be nothing short of legendary.

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