When a cynical journalist encountered the supernatural entertainer

The cynical journalist in me was preparing himself for a field day. A colleague and I had been invited to meet Lior Suchard, an Israeli ‘supernatural entertainer’. Suchard’s selling point, I was informed, is that he can read your innermost thoughts, and better still, he can influence the way you think. Even though I might have had a smug expression on my face, I must admit to feeling more intrigued than sceptical when I entered a first floor room of the Don Bosco Shelter at Matunga in Mumbai.

Before Suchard’s show for the children housed in the building commenced, he had agreed to entertain a little audience of journalists and some representatives of the Israeli embassy.

I sat following each of his movements carefully. The rapid hand movements, I was convinced, betrayed the gregariousness of a practised performer. The constant sipping of Coca Cola was strangely leaving me parched.

The implicit theatricality of even his subtlest gestures became overt when the mentalist came up to me and gave me a little slip of paper, asking me to write the name of my first girlfriend. I checked, he wasn’t looking as I sat scribbling. He quickly tore the piece of paper as soon as I was done and asked me to keep the scraps in my pocket for later. The act was a telling metaphor for that first relationship.

He asked AD, my bemused colleague, to guess a number, only to reveal that he had penned the two digits a minute before she was asked to think it. This was going to be a good evening.

I was asked to take off my glasses and leave it on my seat. As Suchard moved his hands over them, they made a little somersault in the air and landed top down. “Energy” — that’s what this supernatural entertainer said was his secret.

AD got pulled into the act again as she marked her initials on a coin. Holding it in one of her extended clenched fists, she closed her eyes. Suchard held his palms over hers, clearly a few inches away. AD, however, was sure that she could feel his hands press down on hers on each occasion he asked. Her bemusement gave way to a startled wonderment when she saw that the coin she held had been bent. The initials remained to prove that this wasn’t an optical illusion. Suchard returned to me and guessed the name of my ex with frightening precision. I felt as malleable as the metallic coin that had just been bent completely out of shape.

I could only look to cinema for a possible explanation. The bending of the coin sent me back to a scene from The Matrix where a boy with a shaven head looks at a spoon with some intensity. Watching the spoon contorting in mid-air, he says, “It is not the spoon that bends. It is only yourself.”

Suchard’s last trick — if you can even call it that — befuddled me as much as my initial viewing of Christopher Nolan’s Inception. One of the journalists present was asked to put an Indian currency note in an envelope. An iPhone was sent around with Suchard asking each of us to add, multiply or divide random numbers. Not only was the final result of our efforts the number Suchard had written on his pad, but far more freakishly, it was also the serial number on the Rs500 note the fellow journalist had secretly sealed.

The advantage of being a journalist is that you can ask a magician to reveal the method to his tricks. Suchard was thankfully candid.

“You influence people’s thoughts. You can’t plant an emotion, but you can plant a number or a picture.” He says he started young, when he was having soup as a six-year-old and the spoon began to move on its own accord. Suchard says it was difficult growing up at times because he always knew if someone was being honest or not. When I ask if it would be an over-reaction to consider what he does to be an invasion of private space, he defends himself with a disarming charm, “All my life, everything that I do, I do with a smile. And once you smile, no one minds that much.” It’s with good reason then that Suchard has grown used to telling his broadening international audience that they should always think happy thoughts. “You never know who is reading them.”