One Trick to Rule Them All?

It fascinates me no end that magicians perform hundreds of mind-boggling effects, yet it mostly takes a Baba (godman) only one crudely-performed magic trick to build an empire with lakhs of followers.

Hello there!

Trust the month of July has been kind to you and you are looking forward to what August brings your way. I am finally sending you the much-promised write-up about the godman Dhirendra Shastri, aka “Bageshwar Dham Sarkar” and how he is ruling the minds of his followers with some magical-looking demonstrations.

But before we can get to that rather interesting topic, let us look at the winners of our second contest.

Winners of Contest #2

The first prize, being The Thinking Kit, has been won by Ms Priya Padaki, who I am happy to note is one of our most regular and active readers and always makes my day with her enthusiastic and kind responses to the newsletter.

Here are the answers to the Puzzle Contest #2 in Ms Padaki’s own words:

#2A. The answer is 8.

I converted the numbers to their Roman number equivalents and then halved them visually, taking the upper halves 😉

#2B. The answer is - the thief should choose the second option of - being thrown into a pit of lions who have not eaten for 5 months, in order to survive the ordeal. Any lion that has not eaten for 5 months is surely dead and of no threat to the thief!

A closely-contested second prize has been won by Dr Narendra Nayak. The irrepressible Dr Nayak is the president of the Indian Rationalist Association and carries on the good fight against godmen and pseudoscientific cons across the country.

(It is a matter of pure coincidence that Dr Nayak is mentioned in this newsletter focusing on exposing yet another godman. Attributing anything more special, say an alignment of stars or a message from the universe, would have my good friend up in arms with me! Hahaha!)

Hearty congratulations to both our winners!

Rest of you, keep trying and better luck next time! Do not forget to check out today’s contest at the end of this newsletter and submit your winning entries ASAP.

The Curious Case of Bageshwar Dham Sarkar, aka Pandit Dhirendra Krishna Shastri.

It all started with a random message from an unknown number via Telegram: “Hi! I am Sarthi M. Sagar from Dainik Bhaskar, Ahmedabad. Can we talk?”

After a brief exchange of pleasantries, I asked him what this was about. In response, he sent me a barrage of messages: “It’s regarding Dhirendra Shastri. What does he do? Do he use tricks? Can anyone do that? I talked to some psychologist and psychiatrist they say its similar to mentalist.”

I was like, “who is that?” adding that I was “always happy to chat on all things pseudoscience”.

In response, Sagar who had introduced himself as a journalist from Dainik Bhaskar sent me a few YouTube links to watch. “Give me some time, let me look through the videos and call you back,” I told him before ending the call.

(This turned out to be a 25 minute video, which I started watching immediately. I highly recommend you watch it too, before moving ahead. )

Sagar’s persistence (impatience?) was such that he called me at least three times, even as I was trying to watch through the above video. And when I told him I was still looking through the video, he sent me specific timestamps to help me look at particular portions of the video rather than the full lengths.

As I watched the video two things happened. One, I vaguely remembered reading some news about some political altercations in Bihar between Nitish Kumar and the BJP regards this very godman. Two, I began marvelling at the confidence and aplomb with which this conman was fooling the gullible, with what was yet another very simple magic trick. In fact, it did not really need a magic trick, with so many different ways available in which wool could be pulled over people’s eyes. More on this later.

Dhirendra Krishna Shastri’s claim to fame is that he claims to be able to predict the problems and ailments of people before they stand in front of him! Generally, he gets one or two people (from the thousands who have gathered to have an audience with him) to stand up where they are and then proceeds to write eloquently on a couple of sheets of paper. After running a pen over the paper, writing furiously and dramatically, the selected persons are called to the stage one by one. Meanwhile, Dhirendra folds each of the paper sheets in half, and diligently slides it between the pillow and the armrest of his ceremonial throne, pushing it deep inside and out of view.

Once the “volunteer” from the audience has been let up on stage by Dhirendar’s cohorts and security guards, the pandit asks him/her a few demographical questions: What is your name? Where have you come from? What is the problem with which you have come here? After a few moments of this interrogation, Dhirendra ceremoniously reaches between the side pillow and his armrest, and pulls out the written paper he had stuck in there a few moments back. He opens it out and holds it up to the face of the volunteer (devotee?) and says something to the tune of, “I have written this all here already. Can you see this? Can you see I have written all this here?”

Once the devotee nods or says yes in agreement, Dhirendra proceeds to read out loudly whatever it is that he had written on the paper, so that all in the audience can hear and balk in the glory of his predictive powers — quite similar to a stage magician opening a sealed prediction at the end of a show. He then proclaims a solution or cure to the person in front of him which will help rid all the ills and assures that all will be well. Akin to a doctor writing out a prescription, Bageshwar Dham Sarkar (as he likes to be called) too proceeds to write some more things on the same sheet of paper ostensibly to help the devotee remember the instructions, and then folding the paper in halves, hands it over to the person as the remedy he was waiting for.

The same thing repeats many times over in a variety of creative, curious, and even ingenious ways, with many more people drawn from the audience. There are different things said to people who are seemingly just chosen randomly from the gathering, via a list of names he has or others who are picked via some “chosen ones”. At times, he appears to write numbers on outside of these written paper sheets to differentiate between one devotee and another.

Did you watch the video? You really must. I insist. If nothing, follow the original time stamp recommendations sent to me by Mr Sagar:

Check around 15 minutes 
Two cases: a girl came with brother and a second person who asked for number 2
Then from 22:00:00 as well
Other case 24:01:00

I really hope you look at the video, because that will help you understand what I am about to explain. I need you to not just look at the video, but also have your own theories to how he is doing his “miracles”. Are these real psychic phenomena or is he faking them? If the latter, how? After all, one of the stated goals of this newsletter is to help develop critical thinking.

Let me start by asking a couple of basic questions.

If Dhirendra Shastri is omniscient and able to know things before they occur, and have the ability to know who will come in front of him — when, and with what ailment — why then does he need to write it down secretly, and only announce it after the fact (of being told these details by the “volunteer”)?

If the above is basically for dramatic impact (and boy O boy! Am I impressed with his stage presence! If only more magicians had that level of audience control and presentational skills… but I am digressing), then why is the paper on which he has written all these predictions, folded and secured away from everybody’s reach and eyesight? Would it not be so much more impactful, if the same written paper was handed over to the person that appeared in front of him, to be held securely in plain sight of everybody, and to be read soon after the person told their life story?

Why write numbers at all? If the written papers were to be distinguished from each other, they could just be kept on different sides of his throne, all in full view of everybody. If keeping one on the left and another on the right is too confusing, he could just write the names of the people — and he clearly already knows who is coming to meet him from where — large and clearly on the paper.

Now think of your own thoughts and answers to what the pandit is claiming to be doing, and examine your solutions in the context of my questions. Do they help you?

As a mentalist or magician of the mind, I too profess the ability to read minds, project thoughts, and predict things before they occur. To achieve this theatrical reality of a psychic, we magicians employ a lot of techniques and methods to ensure our audiences can suspend their disbelief and enjoy a mesmerising act. Deep inside, everybody (magician and the audience) knows that this is all an act and a world of make believe, albeit a very good one, akin to theatre or movie.

The primary reason a magician would need to write out a prediction and show it ONLY after the fact, is many! The audience may not behave in the way anticipated, the trick may not go per plan, and at many times, we may really just not know till after the fact. This brings fruit to many devious methods, props, and handlings, to ensure just one goal: the prediction is correct. The methods are indeed too many (nor is it my intent) to discuss here, but suffice to say we may control your choices, manipulate your thoughts, force certain outcomes, use confederates in the audience (aka stooges), add in elements to the writing after the fact, or even just swap the prediction!

We are also aware that some of these are the exact solutions that our audiences will hit upon as they experience an act. To make that more difficult and to ensure that the mystery and intrigue remain, we add in elements to the presentation. For e.g., lobbing a ball around in the audience to choose a random spectator cancels out the confederate idea or getting a prediction envelope sealed and signed and held in the custody of a respectable guest cancels out a lot of other theories. Sometimes the techniques are also well-planned red-herrings to take the audience down the wrong path, to further ensure that they can’t spoil the magic for themselves by realising the secret.

Yet this is very different. This is a person who is not doing this for entertainment, but to fool the poor and the gullible for his own ends. This is a conman who is misusing tactics of magic to make others believe that he has certain special powers using which he can know all and heal all. This is a psychopath who is rattling off whatever whims and fancies come to his mind at that point in time, as unquestionable god-sent cures to his most devoted, putting their everything at risk.

There are too many ways in which this one effect could be performed. The whole arena is in his control, and there have been enough “faith healers” in the past who have been exposed for using hidden earpieces to receive critical information. There are enough and more instances in this video that point to premeditated actions to select pre-chosen people using stooges. There are also enough opportunities to get all the required information of a randomly selected audience member, between the time they are chosen and they get to step on to the stage, even as they wait on the stage-side surrounded by the godman’s team.

Most of the time though, it appears that he is brazenly holding the badly scribbled paper out in front of the devotee — who can’t read it anyway, and then filling in some more of the key details later on when he’s claiming to write out the prescription. It would be easiest to have a person sit secretly under that huge massive throne doing the actual writing on the sheets of paper and feeding it back to Dhirendra between a specially designed space near the armrest.

I am giving you multiple explanations because all of these are plausible, and I think a variety of them would be put to use at varying times to achieve the one single goal: to fool and loot the gullible. And there will be many more Dhirendras out there. The only thing we can do is be aware and ask questions — ask questions of ourselves, what are the various ways in which he could be faking this? That is really the only way we can hope to fight and stop the loot. Are you game?

PS: Sarthi Sagar did a detailed, hour-long video interview with me, which was then crystallised into a long, detailed expose of the godman for Divya Bhaskar. (The original article is in Gujarati. Here’s a Google Translate version in English, but the auto-translated version reads rather bad. ChatGPT gave me a much better translation and perhaps you could try that if you are so inclined.)

Contest #4: Curious Puzzles

Here we are at the end of yet another newsletter and it is time for our curious contest, and another chance at winning one of the last few remaining sets of The Thinking Kit.

#4A: To Tell or Not to Tell

A man has been imprisoned in a tower with two doors. One door leads to freedom, while the other leads to the dungeons. Standing outside each door is a guard, one of who always tells the truth, while the other always lies.

The prisoner needs to find out which door is the one to freedom, but he can only talk to one of the two guards and ask only one question.

What does he do? (You need to specify the question.)

#4B: Who is the tallest of them all?

Which was the highest mountain in the world before Mount Everest was discovered?

For a chance to win, reply with the your answers to BOTH the puzzles. You can also send that directly to nakulshenoy@substack.com

Addendum

Twitter has been X’d by Elon Musk in more ways than one, and weirdly it looks like a conspiracy to take away the one platform that was truly democratising the world and giving a voice to the unheard. Either way, I am being more active on BlueSky (while lingering on Mastodon) and you can find me in both those platforms with my usual @nakulshenoy handle.

I know a lot of you may have hopped over to Threads by Meta, but that is a space I have stayed away from at this point, having quit WhatsApp a few years back and perennially sitting on the verge of shutting down my Instagram and FB accounts. I am easily reachable via Telegram at @nakulshenoy and that is how Mr Sagar reached me in the first place.

All this is to say, I love hearing from you folks. So do write in on your preferred medium or just hit reply here. :-)

Stay well, stay safe.

Yours magically,

Nakul

PS: And oh! Look out for Good Omens 2 as it releases worldwide via Amazon Prime tomorrow, the 27th of July starting 8:00pm EST!