Mentalist Suhani Shah’s Chamatkar India Tour promises an immersive experience
The Hindu
Suhani Shah, India's first female mentalist, mind reader, illusionist and magician, has been performing since age 6. She dropped out of school in 1st grade, but worked hard to write her best-selling book ‘Unleash Your Inner Power. ‘Suhani has given over 5,000 shows worldwide and is the most subscribed and watched mentalist in the world. Suhani is presently on a Chamatkar Tour in India.
When she was 14, Suhani Shah’s dad suggested she write a book on her experiences as a magician on stage. She was enthused with the idea, but there was a glitch. She did not know how to read or write, as she had dropped out of school in the first grade.
“I worked on my English language, maths and science and only then ventured to write the book,” says Suhani over a Zoom video call amid her eight-city Chamatkar Tour in the country. Her book Unleash Your Inner Power, published by Jaico, became a bestseller, leading her to pen more books parallel to a career as a magician and mentalist.
Now, aged 33, Suhani is India’s one of the first and only female mentalist, mind reader, illusionist and magician. Over the last two decades — starting at the age of six — she has given over 5,000 shows worldwide. She’s the most watched mentalist in the world.
It seemed fitting that Suhani started the conversation by revealing the difference between a magician and a mentalist. “Every mentalist is a magician. But not every magician is a mentalist. Mentalism is a subgenre of magic. I started my career as an illusionist, and a decade ago, I turned into a mentalist. It’s pretty much like the many branches in journalism - politics, entertainment, sports and others; magic has various branches too.”
Becoming a mentalist was a natural progression in her art form that was triggered at the age of nine when people from her audience started seeking personal help after her show. “They would talk about their illnesses and wanted to know if my magic could cure them. They would want to know the culprits of a robbery in town. Someone brought their child with autism and wanted to know what was happening in his mind. Things like that have been happening with me since a young age. I would tell people that magic is an art form, a trick and not real. I tell them that they believe and think I can cure, but I don’t.”
On stage, Suhani’s magic tricks were on par with the veteran magicians. Her shows in schools, village fairs, parties, and auditoriums across the country made her one of the best illusionist artistes. Her incredible talent for guessing and predicting people’s minds while being blindfolded put her in the league of top mentalists in the world.
For Suhani, interacting with her audience led to developing an interest in psychology and human behaviour; she also started giving talks and conducting training programmes in that field. “By the time I was 20, I realised I was involved in two fields - performing arts and psychology. I opened a centre in Goa where people would come to meet me and talk about these things. But I soon realised It was too much. I didn’t want to mess up doing two different things, so at one point I combined the art of magic with psychology, and that came up as mentalism.”
