This Pakistani mind reader can guess your ATM PIN

Mystery performer, mind reader Shaheer Khan can tell you your ATM pin number

KARACHI: In an exchange from Christopher Nolan’s much-loved The Prestige, Angier tells Borden, “The audience knows the truth: the world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you can make them wonder, and then you ... then you got to see something really special. You really don’t know? It was ... it was the look on their faces ...”

Angier, played by Hugh Jackman, is here underscoring a key function of any and every stage performance but we will come to that in a bit.

Saturday night was the first time I came across the term mentalist. Although I have heard stories of magicians and illusionists and mind readers, both fake and real, from family elders throughout my childhood, I do not recall from recent memory witnessing what I witnessed at Karachi’s FTC Auditorium.



Years after first entering the limelight with an online talent show that came out when Facebook was still entertaining, the self-proclaimed ‘mystery performer’ Shaheer Khan returned to stage once again. While the show may have been put together to test the waters before he and his troupe embark on a country-wide tour after Eid, unfortunately, not many turned up to see what he is really up to.

If you think no one can read your mind better than your mother or that sibling who is your ultimate nemesis, meet Shaheer: an art school dropout who realised too soon that educational institutions in the real world are more Foucauldian and less how Rowling envisions them.



Called ‘The Other Side’, the show saw Shaheer begin by giving a less-than-convincing introduction about intuition and the working of the human mind, and then reveal, one after the other, the many sides to his astonishing talent. Warm-up tricks such as those that involved playing cards, paper bags and spikes stretched the show a bit, and by the time Shaheer began guessing words and memories, telling the colour of an attendee’s underwear and cutting out the face of Leonardo DiCaprio from folded paper, it was too late to entice the audience any further.



This is not to undermine his fantastical trickery. Trust me, his final act that involves a childhood story and a taped paper ball will leave you stunned.

I feel, and I might be wrong, that our audiences are too brutal to sit through 90 minutes and just watch someone tell them what’s on their mind. You have to draw them in slowly and not give them time to think what you’re doing is too good to be true. That’s not their job. They are there because, as the Nolans write, “they want to be fooled”.

What can be said with full confidence is that Shaheer’s talents are fresh, sophisticated and quite engaging. However, his showmanship requires some polishing and some of the acts require oiling. ‘The Other Side’ is still an unprecedented product and with a little restructuring and better scripting, this can turn into a world-class act for which only word-of-mouth is enough to get audiences queuing up.

Dr Fazlur Rehman Malik once said, and I paraphrase, that something extraordinary happening once, is not a miracle. To happen continually without fail and to recreate is what a miracle really is. Whether Shaheer or his ability to guess your name and tell you your ATM pin number is a game changer in our live entertainment circuit, one cannot say just yet. What one can say, however, is that something new has finally arrived on stage. And it does typify a lot of promise.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 17^th, 2016.

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