“It’s a mixture of body language, psychology, and magic”: Karan Singh, Illusionist

Karan Singh’s mind-boggling magic tricks leave his audience awe-inspired. His tricks aren’t the usual cutting-people-in-half tricks that most think of when they hear magic shows. We hosted Karan as part of our special series, NewsX Influencers A-List. Below are the excerpts from the interview:

We, first of all, wanted to let our viewers in on the story behind the illusionist’s intriguing stage name ‘Karan Singh Magic,’ so Karan gladly narrated to us, “In the late 2000s, almost everybody in my social circle had a DSLR, and if one had a DSLR, it was almost compulsory to have a Facebook page.” He continued, “A friend of mine made a Facebook page for me, and because everybody doing photography had the suffix ‘photography’ in their page’s name, so my friend named my page ‘Karan Singh Magic,’ and that name has just stuck since then.”

The illusionist addressed our interest in his magical journey by telling us, “I had gone for a summer camp when I was 11 years old, this was 2002, and I met a magician there who taught me a trick, and I started learning more and more from there.” Karan added, ”I started looking for videos online, started doing Google searches for easy magic tricks, reached the 50th page of search results, and just learnt everything on the way. And then, by day 10, I was a magician, and I was just doing tricks, performing for people as much as I could.”

Our next question to Karan was if he was always clear about his goal of becoming a magician, to which he replied, “I was very clear that I wanted to be a magician, my family wasn’t. They wanted me to go for a professional career, and I did see the point of it, so I did go to college, but I eventually dropped out in my final year because I had started doing enough shows by then.” He further told us that his training in theatre, which helps him perform, is the only formal education he has received after school.

“The genre of magic that I do is called mentalism. It’s where I can figure out what people are thinking of, and that could be random things like a word from a book, but then if you see what all I have done in the last few years, it’s people’s personal secrets like ATM pins, or phone passwords, or the first person they had a crush on when they were a kid,” said the mentalist while explaining how what he does is different from what people usually think when they hear the word “magic.”

Karan then responded to our curiosity about his tricks by vaguely disclosing the method that he used while performing a mind-reading trick where he asked cricketer Virat Kohli to think of a childhood friend’s name, “The first thing that I figure out is the first letter. I asked him to say the name to himself again & again.” He told us how a really slight lip movement by Kohli gave away the first letter of the name. Moreover, he said, “It’s a mixture of body language, psychology, and magic.”

As our final question, we asked what Karan thinks about formal training for budding magicians, to which he answered, “In a strange way, magic is the only art form in the world that drives you away from itself, once you learn it.” He elaborated his words with an example, “If I told you that I’m gonna teach you to figure out a name that somebody’s thinking of, you’ll think you’ll get all these amazing powers, but the moment you know how the trick is done, you’ll get put off by it.” Concluding the interview, the magician remarked, “Magic, I think, is always learned better on your own, as opposed to through an institution.”