Mind sweeper

She can 'guess' your phone passcode; your secret crush. In her shows and TV appearances, she talks about how all magic is a learned skill, and how that's a kind of magic too. The 35-year-old just won an award at the World Championship of Magic. 'I want to use my art to remind people to question what they think they are seeing. I want to fight blind faith,' she says

- Sukanya Datta

You know the stories we tell ourselves, in our search for answers, for hope, or just to get through a hard day? For mentalist Suhani Shah, true magic lies just there: in belief.

"It is belief that turns stones into gods, after all, isn't it," she says.

Shah, 35, has been a practising magician since she was seven. She began as an illusionist and is now a mentalist. Through her tricks and mind games, she is always chasing the same question: What determines what we choose to believe?

In her shows, she appears to guess a person's crush and routinely unlocks strangers' phones. "This too, of course, is a learned skill. It is not a supernatural ability. No magic is," she says, smiling.

Shah recently won the Best Magic Creator award at the World Championship of Magic, held every three years by the Switzerland-based International Federation of Magic Societies. "It feels unreal," she says.

In addition to her stage shows and appearances on TV morning shows around the world, she runs a YouTube channel (with over 4.5 million subscribers) where she periodically demonstrates how she performs some of her simpler tricks.

With each show and each demonstration, she says, the aim is to send a deeper message: Don't believe everything you see; question it all. "I want to use my art to fight blind faith," she says.

Excerpts from an interview.

Tell us about the TV show that sparked it all for you...

I remember it was a Sunday morning. I was six years old, in our Ahmedabad home, and a magician was on TV. He borrowed money from an audience member, made it disappear, then made it reappear from within an apple. It blew my mind. I remember thinking, "How did he do that, and more importantly, how can I do that?"