An hour before the shoot, magician, mentalist and bizarrist Sarcar—that’s how his card describes him—is in his make-up van, surrounded by a stack of laptops, a colourful ashtray where a cigarette has been hastily stubbed out, and bottles of packaged drinking water. Up close, the layers of make-up are visible. “In India, you tell someone you are a street magician and they think, ‘madaari hai,” he says. “But it’s a great art, more difficult than a stage show. I’ve only shown you a trailer.”

Sarcar’s show strings together episodes of him surprising passers-by with his tricks. He approaches the man on the street or the market with politeness, pulls out his pack of cards and the magic begins. He has slid a coin into a sealed bottle of water without opening it, levitated on a Mumbai sidewalk, bent spoons and made cellphones ring on their own. It’s a no-fuss performance shorn of grand gestures. It tells the audience that this is an impromptu, unrehearsed performance—that the conjuror has plucked magic out of the humdrum life around him. It works, though is not exactly edge-of-the-seat action. Sometimes, the show appears amateur in its production values.

For Bindass, the magic is in the viewership figures. 3rd Degree is now the most popular show on the channel. “Its popularity has only grown. When we started out in September, it was a two-minute filler. It got people hooked and in November, we started a full half-hour episode,” says Shalini Seth, creative director of 3rd Degree.
Which is not saying much. Even the great powers of the occult cannot beat everlasting saas-bahu soaps and screechy song-and-dance shows at the TRP game. Bindass, moreover, has a niche viewership and the number of the show’s loyal watchers is a blip. But it does hold up a new, and, sometimes, gripping face of contemporary magic.

... contd.