This female mentalist has many avatars

“Write down your first crush’s name and your age then on a chit. Fold it and hand it over,” 33-year-old mentalist Kruti Parekh instructed. Once I did, she tore it without opening and asked me to repeat the age in my mind. “Were you in your early teens?” I nodded. She scribbled 14/15 and showed me. OMG! “Now spell his name in your head”. I nodded again. “Does it have six letters? Is an alphabet repeating thrice?” Yes! She wrote his name hangman style: A A K A S H. I was stunned despite knowing Parekh is among Asia’s handful women mentalists. She’d agreed to “show me a few tricks” before I set out to interrogate. Next, she asked me to remove any currency note, fold it and use a calculator to “multiply any three, three-digit numbers”. I chose the numbers randomly, not knowing the point and the total turned out to be the serial number on my Rs. 100 note! How does she do it? Using psychological suggestion techniques and reading body language, Parekh performs mentalism acts like telepathy, teleportation, ESP and psychokinesis (moving/bending objects using the mind).

A child prodigy

At the age of five, during a trip to Lonavala when Parekh saw a street magician perform she was blown away and requested him to teach her. He brushed it aside, but her father convinced him. “When I returned and performed what I’d learnt, my family and friends were amazed,” recalls Parekh, who at Fantasy Land requested a magician to let her to perform on stage. “The audience was so impressed, parents asked their kids to get my autograph. I loved the recognition.” 

There on, she’d catch all magic shows and relatives would gift her magic kits and books. She tried learning from magicians too, “but no one wanted to teach; they’d offer excuses like you’re too small. I once told a magician, “Sikhao mat, par dikhao toh’ to discover the new stuff. If I figured their act, I’d say, ‘yeh toh purana hai, mujhe aata hai’. They’d doubt me, but would be intrigued when I’d demonstrate it differently and then agree to show me their method, if I showed mine.”

Soon she was performing at school, parties, Fun Fairs and got invitations too. After people began taking her for granted, her parents started charging. When she was eight, they organised a solo show for her at Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan with 400 crew backstage. “My parents were worried people may jeer if something went wrong, but it did well and TV channels covered me as a child prodigy.”

It landed her a contract with Bank of Saurashtra for a series of shows and a mentor in William Zambago (colleague of P.C. Sorcar). Then 94, Zambago made her promise she’ll “make the tricks live another 100 years.” In the two years before he passed away, Parekh mastered over 8,000 tricks and at 10, did her first international show. In Grade V, she performed for Mother Teresa “the only one alive from all the amazing people we were reading about in school; I wrote her a letter to perform for her missionary,” shares the genius whose heroes were Paul Daniels, Wayne Dixon and later, David Copperfield. By 15, she created a Limca record for the youngest magician and another for the youngest female illusionist, represented India at Worldwide Magicians Meet in Las Vegas and had over 1,500 performances to her credit. Her save-the-environment tricks got noticed by Australia’s PM and got her UNEP’s Global 500 Roll of Honour award.

Science and the Supernatural

Meanwhile, her school, Walsingham, was strict. “I had to miss several opportunities, but good grades allowed me to pursue science and then engineering at DJ Sanghvi”. She took engineering because “magic is also science. I did shows with maths and physics. The knowledge helps in making props, creating levitations…it’s all mechanics. Chemicals and refraction of light help you create effects -- in most UV light shows only the fluorescent bodysuits are visible, in mine, you can see the audience’s faces too.” At 17, Kruti was selected as jury for the children's Nobel Prize (2002) by the queen of Sweden. And IT + magic knowledge prompted a renowned magician to her to create him a software. “Unlike traditional magicians, who do the same thing for 50 years, I strive to do something new. That’s how I advanced to the mentalist stage. Around 2003, reading the Gita, Upanishads, etc., I began drawing parallels with science. The soul it’s said can never be created or destroyed. Newton’s law of energy says just that -- energy can only change form, but can’t be destroyed. As soul is energy, when it leaves, the body dies.”

Magic and mentalism in new moulds

After a brief IT stint post college, she realised the ‘nine to five’ wasn’t for her. Magic and mentalism were. “My businessman father was glad I wanted to do my own thing, but advised I create a niche.”

Jobless for three months, she began thinking of different applications of magic leading to a journey of unique ideas to meet corporate clients’ requests -- yoga with mentalism, destination marketing with magic, mentalism concepts to overcome fears or improve sales staff’s performance through mind shift. Depending on their complexity, she takes a week to a month to prepare. She charges 50,000 onwards per project and works largely corporates rather than stage shows because “magic and mentalism weren’t considered performing arts for long and venues don’t give it half the support dancing and singing get.” Even a leading TV channel's reality show India’s Magic Star, which she was on, folded quickly. But it gave Parekh a Bollywood break. “After my act, someone asked whether I’d work with Hritik Roshan to promote Guzarish.” Thereafter, she did it for several stars. She has authored Beyond the Threshold of Mind and documented all her acts, breaking down the process to create life cycles for them during her doctorate in Magical Entertainment and Humanities from Columbia University, USA. Four years on, she bagged a bronze for the ‘World’s Best Speaker Performer’ at Sophia, Bulgaria.

Off late, she has begun weaving magic into weddings, teaching brides and grooms to perform optical illusions, conjuring acts and magical theatrics in grand settings with themes of their choice be it James Bond or a traditional Raja Rani ki Kahani. Finally, meeting success in helping her father recover from a brain stroke with magic tricks, now she’s also helping special/autistic kids in personality development and occupational therapy.