Every little thing he does is .....

One of the beautiful things about being a child is that you look at anything you don’t understand or cannot reason in your head with a sense of awe and amazement. As we grow older, we become skeptical and cynical. Things or events don’t wow us anymore. Whether or not we know the reasoning behind it, we assume that there is nothing great about it because there is obviously a valid explanation for it. Of course, the richest man in the world is someone we are in awe of! The problem is that we, adults, “outgrow” things, or we convince ourselves that we are too old to be able to enjoy or be amused by certain things. Cartoons, lollipops, teddy bears, and amongst those many things, magic.

There has been a time in everyone’s lives (hopefully), when we were young, when we were awed out of our minds after a magic show. As kids, we’d look at the magician as someone who could perform any miracle. As we grow up, we know they’re just tricks or illusions created by the magician and we cease to be amazed anymore. But we must give credit where its due, and no matter how we feel about the magic “trick” performed, whatever be our age, we stop for one moment to think, “I wonder how he did that”! And that is the beauty of it all. You could be 20, 40 or 70, but for that one moment, it makes you wonder like a little child, whether you want to admit it to yourself or not.

As anyone who knows me well can vouch for it, my favourite channel on T.V. is still Cartoon Network, I still love sucking on lollipops though for (maybe) slightly different reasons than while I was younger, and I still sleep with my teddy bear that I’ve had with me since I was 4 or 5. So it will come as no surprise that when I watch magic (and I don’t think of them as tricks), to this day I go, “WOW!”

When I was in school, there was a peon by the name Ashok who was a great magician. He performed tricks (for the lack of a better word) that blew my mind away. I would always run to him when I saw him and asked him to “Do magic, uncle!” I think I was one of his favourites because I would never pester him about how he did it or to teach me. And I know he enjoyed the look of awe on my face once he was done. At home, my mom had bought a few magic show tapes that I would watch a lot, over and over again. The magicians were different, and the tricks were similar – pulling something out of an empty hat, never-ending ribbons coming out of a tongue or some other body part, having a volunteer enter a box and cutting the box into two without hurting the volunteer, lots of card tricks, disappearing objects etc. – but my reaction was the same. In all my years as a child, I never thought one magician was better than another. They were all great to me. But today I idolize someone. And the most surprising thing of all is that he’s American!

“There is a fine line between life and death, truth and deceit, dreams and reality - magic blurs that line.” The day I heard him say that, I fell in love with David Blaine. Now for those of you who’ve never heard of him, I can only pity you. Anyway, it’s never too late, and why fear when I’m here to tell you all about him. Blaine is most famous for his “street magic” and his life-defying stunts. Street magic made Blaine really popular amongst the people as he would walk on the streets in various cities and towns all over the US and perform tricks (gosh, there’s got to be a better word!) for random people on the street. His levitation stunt became most popular. He has freaked quite a lot of people in the process. In certain towns he was shooed away because magic is frowned upon as it is related to voodoo and black magic, and so they wanted to keep away from him.

There’s one amazing incident that made me admire Blaine all the more. Once he went into the Amazon forests and approached one particular tribe (the name of which I can’t seem to remember suddenly) who’ve been famous for chasing away any foreigners who try to contact them by throwing poisonous spears at them. Now Blaine did not attempt to talk to any of them. All he did was perform “tricks”. And he soon had a captivated audience. That is another beauty of magic. He could not converse with them. Nor they with him. But his magic did the talking. He tried to show them card tricks but soon realized that they had never seen cards before and could not relate to the numbers and shapes. So he resorted to showing them tricks using leaves and sticks and other objects they’ve lived amongst.

Recently, Blaine has become more famous for his feats of endurance. His first feat was being buried alive in a coffin for seven days in Trump Park, New York. His second feat involved being encased in ice in Times Square, New York, for almost 62 hours (called ‘Frozen in Time’). His third feat was standing on a 22-inch wide, 105-foot tall pillar in Bryant Park, New York, for 35 hours and later jumping off it onto just some measly cardboard boxes (called ‘Vertigo’). His latest stunt was his first stunt outside the US. He hung himself 450 feet above the Thames River in London for 44 days in a Plexiglass box with no food (called ‘Above the Below’). All his stunts were visible for the public eye to see. (For further details about any of the stunts including pictures, go to http://www.magicdirectory.com/blaine/)

Many of you might be reading this and going “hmph”. But that’s just because you’re looking at it all wrong. In fact, the British didn’t take too well with his stunts. They were quite rude and threw foodstuff at him etc. So much for their classiness! “You've picked the wrong town to be hung in, Mr Blaine," wrote The Sunday Times. "What is clear from the start is that Londoners are not taking Blaine quite as seriously as he takes himself. Really, it makes you proud to be British."The British are just so uptight! They need to lighten up. They were being skeptical and saying things like “Oh, he must be getting his food somehow” or “It’s probably an illusion”.

Now this is how I personally view Blaine’s stunts. It really doesn’t matter up to what extent these stunts are authentic, or whether he is being fed food through tubes, or whether there have been other people in the past who have done “crazy” things too! We first need to acknowledge the fact that David Blaine is a human being, as real as any body else alive. I find what Blaine does inspirational. People are focusing on the wrong aspects of his stunts if they’re more bothered about whether he looks thinner after a stunt, or if he looks like he’s been fed well. He is living proof that there is nothing in this world you can’t do if you put your mind to it. Maybe he proves them with slightly extreme stunts. But that’s his way of doing it. To quote him, “We are all capable of infinitely more than we believe. We are stronger and more resourceful than we know, and we can endure much more than we think we can. In truth, the only restrictions on our capacity to astonish ourselves and each other are imposed by our own minds." How very true. When you hear him talk, you will realize that this is not a crazy, stupid man who’s trying to create world records. Here’s someone who’s letting the world know that it’s all a matter of ‘mind over body’, and he’s proving it too. Now, that is something we can all learn from this young man. When I’m watching him on TV, I’m not trying to figure out the ways through which he might be breaking his own self-imposed rules. It’s not a joke to go without food for even a couple of hours. And I’m talking about us who are reasonably well off with no reason to want to be starving ourselves. His stunts are something that most of us would not take on. Isolation and starvation over long periods of time is not really fun, especially in claustrophobic confinements. I admire, respect and applaud him for his sheer determination to do such tasks. David Blaine is only doing what he loves most, and he is doing it with a passion. This is his way of making a living and maybe trying to touch people’s lives in a “crazy” kind of way. People will always be there to mock and criticize and pull people down, when they are doing something good, be it for themselves or others. Our generation and the coming ones can definitely benefit from the likes of Blaine who inspire us to achieve our goals, no matter how impossible they may seem at first. I really wish him all the success and good luck for his upcoming endeavors, as he is touching the lives of many people all over the world in some way or the other. It may seem stupid to risk his life for his “stunts” but it is part of his job that he chooses to do. As Martin Luther King Junior said, “If you haven’t found something worth dying for, then there’s no point living.” And this is how Blaine feels about his job. Call them stunts, call them illusions, call them tricks – to me, it’s pure magic!

Video links:

http://media.tlc.discovery.com/convergence/magic/videogallery.html - Here are 6 videos of Blaine performing street magic. There are two or three ads you might have to bear with but it’s worth it. By the way, boys, you are sure to like the last one!!!

http://www.milkandcookies.com/links/7518/ - Warning! Warning! Warning! This video is quite gory. So if you have a weak heart, are pregnant or sleep with your lights on during thunderstorms, please think twice before watching.