Kerala magicians divided on actor’s ‘fire escape act’

Kochi, April 21 : A section of Kerala magicians have come out against Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal’s bid to do the ‘fire escape act’ in Thiruvananthapuram, this month end.

Senior magician Samraj and others on Monday appealed to Mohanlal, who has been training under magician Gopinath Muthukad for about a year now to perform the daredevil act, to back off. The opposing magicians have also declared on Monday that they would hand a petition signed by 300 professional Kerala magicians to the Association of Malayalam Movie Artistes (AMMA), seeking to prevent the actor from performing the ‘fire escape act’.

The act in question involves the performer being chained and lowered upside down in a metal box using a crane into a big haystack, which would be set afire. The Kerala police and the Kerala State Youth Welfare Board are jointly organising the performance.

The magicians who held a press conference here on Monday said the actor is just not trained enough to perform this act, and alleged that his trainer, Muthukad, was himself burnt when he had tried the act in Bahrain sometime back. “Who is going to answer if Mohanlal is unable to come out of the act safely?” the magicians posed.

Accusing Muthukad of ruthlessly trying to piggyback on a naive Mohanlal’s image with no concern about his safety, the magicians made a public appeal to Lal not to go forward with the act. They also announced a symbolic one-man protest against it in Kochi on Tuesday, which would have Samraj spending three hours locked up inside a freezing mobile mortuary.

Muthukad, however, maintained that the protests were because some magicians wanted to keep key tricks their closely held monopoly. He said he was certain that Lal has trained hard enough to perform safely.

Muthukad accused the other side of hoping to get cheap publicity by deriding the popular actor’s bid.

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