The Hindu : Kerala / Kochi News : Magic academy to set up centre in Kochi

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Magic academy to set up centre in Kochi

Staff Reporter

The new centre will offer courses for two sections of magic enthusiasts.

KOCHI: Magic is all about the skill to keep the audience under a sustained spell of illusion. As it may be, the desire of magic fans in the city for a centre to teach them a few tricks may no longer be an illusion.

The magic bandwagon of acclaimed magician Gopinath Muthukad to reach the city this August will turn that into a reality.

Minister for Culture and Education M.A. Baby will inaugurate the Kochi centre of the Academy of Magical Sciences at Panampilly Nagar on August 16.

It is being set up in association with the SB Global Education Resources Private Limited.

The academy set up in Thiruvananthapuram back in 1996 has O.N.V. Kurup as its patron and Mr. Muthukad as its executive director. It is the academy’s first sub-centre in its 13 years of existence.

On the occasion, film director Sathyan Anthikkad released a directory on India magicians brought out by the academy by handing over a copy to the general manager of Federal Bank T.S. Jagadeesan.

Mr. Muthukad said that the directory running into 433 pages contains the contact details of about 2,000 Indian magicians, including that of little known street magicians.

He said the directory was the result of a year-long hard work. To make the search easy, the directory has separate index pages based on real and stage names of magicians.

Addressing a press conference here, Mr. Muthukad said that apart from a variety of courses, the academy had been offering a plethora of services for the welfare of magicians from across the country.

Besides, it had also undertaken researches with the aim of conserving magical heritage that came from the folk magic lineage, he said.

The new centre will offer courses for two sections of magic enthusiasts.

“One batch will be made up of professionals like doctors and engineers who pursue magic as a hobby and also those who aim at developing their magic skills as a means of livelihood,” Mr. Muthukad said.

Another batch will be for children aged 10 and above. Magic lessons will be applied for making arduous mathematics and science lessons simple. “There has been widespread demand for opening centres of the academy from across the State.

The biggest demand, however, had been from Kochi,” Mr. Muthukad said of the reason for choosing the city for its first ever sub-centre.

Besides Mr. Muthukad, a battery of reputed magicians including the honorary directors of the academy, Chandrasenan Mithirmala, and R. Raja Moorthy; noted Karnataka magician Prahlad Acharya; an expert in mental aspects, Nakul Shenoy; and former secretary of the Indian Ring of International Brotherhood of Magicians, S. Sreekanth, will form the teaching faculty.

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