Children in Slums of India Learn Only Magic SkillsInside MagicMagic News Updated Daily for the Professional Magician

Indian Magician in Slums Performs

This is a very strange story and if I had read it written by me, I would assume it was one of my fanciful tales. I didn’t write it but I am writing about it now.

The town of Sakkardara, India, is apparently a terrible location in which to raise a family or to even live. The area lakes and streams are contaminated with filth and the standards we take for granted are far from achieved. There is no literacy in the adult or child populations, the medical care is absent and there is very little hope of finding a way out of the slums.

This is the strange part. For some reason, the skill passed from generation to generation is the ability to perform magic ? not supernatural magic, but our kind of magic; rabbit out of a hat, magic. The Hindustan Times source observed one family where magic has been passed through three generations.

Most cannot even write their own names. And like their parents they dont seem to mind. Formal education is considered unnecessary in their world of magic. The mindset is so staunch that most fathers feel committed to teach magic rather than alphabets to their children. The training starts as early as the age of six.
A family of eight barely sees the father earn Rs 1,500 per month. But there is little sense of family planning. Iqbal, a 13-year-old magician, has six siblings. He innocently says, “Sabke teen-teen to ladke hai hi jadu seekhne ke liye,” (every home has at least three young boys to learn magic).

While the young men are levitating, sawing in half or vanishing their assistants, they are covered with skin diseases fostered by the surrounding environment. The mainstream India press looks at this as a tragedy and of course it is. The children are not taught to read or write; their hygiene is disregarded but their ability to perform magic is encouraged.

As magicians, we might be encouraged to see these children and adults as fellow magicians with the same interests we have and the same needs we share. It is harder to dismiss the starvation or illness when you view the victim as an individual like you. If we can objectify the victim or determine a way to rationalize their situation (“if they wanted to get out of the slime, they could but they chose to stay”), it is much easier to turn our gaze to more pleasant views.

In this case, though, we perform the same tricks as they do, we have the same…

Indian Magician in Slums Performs

This is a very strange story and if I had read it written by me, I would assume it was one of my fanciful tales. I didn’t write it but I am writing about it now.

Most cannot even write their own names. And like their parents they dont seem to mind. Formal education is considered unnecessary in their world of magic. The mindset is so staunch that most fathers feel committed to teach magic rather than alphabets to their children. The training starts as early as the age of six.
A family of eight barely sees the father earn Rs 1,500 per month. But there is little sense of family planning. Iqbal, a 13-year-old magician, has six siblings. He innocently says, “Sabke teen-teen to ladke hai hi jadu seekhne ke liye,” (every home has at least three young boys to learn magic).

In this case, though, we perform the same tricks as they do, we have the same excitement and satisfaction when the show is offered. We are just like them ? as we are like all men and women on the planet. It is tougher, at least for me, to distance myself from a fellow that loves magic as much as me. I suppose their story would have been published even without the magic angle but I can almost guarantee that I would not have noticed it on the news wires.