Life is magical

Aditi Mathur & Ratnesh Mathur

If you have slept under the skies, or if you have watched birds fly or seen sunflowers turn towards the sun or ripples formed at a place where a stone vanished … then you would have marvelled at the magic show Nature puts up every day.

If you have drunk cola by holding the liquid in the straw and closing the mouth of the straw at the other end, or if you have used the sharp end of a needle or a nail to make it go in smoothly, or if you have used steam to cook tender idlis … then you have been practicing magic every day.

Now don’t take away this magic from me and start calling it science or physics for it is not that for me. I look at it as magic.

Imagine what will happen if we were to do one magic trick every day starting at six years and pausing only at the sixteenth. The why and how and the excitement of doing the tricks repeatedly to astonish myself will be my staple diet and the humongous discussions with different conclusions and myriad theories will become my food for thought.

Try this – announce a magic show, call an audience, ask them to wear a black coat and carry an egg. Now ask each person in the audience to break it using only their fingers. It won’t break however hard they try. Next offer them a magic wand made of straw and let them try to break the egg with it. Then maybe one made of rolled paper. Then in the final act – a real magic wand – a wooden one and when they tap the egg with this wand, viola! the egg breaks.

The applause, ladies and gentlemen, is not in the form of claps but all the questions that echo in your mind after the magic. And after the din dies down in doubtful debates, step up and announce the next trick … for life is magical.

And if anybody dares to tell you that this is simply science or physics get angry with them and tell them that in this magical world, this statement is a blasphemy and that he/she needs to be punished. Ask him/her to show both their palms to you – punishment time – one hand with palm up and one with palm down and then tap on each with the same force and ask them which one hurts more and why there is a difference and dismiss their earlier assertion by challenging them to do something to make it hurt the same both ways.

So dear physics teachers, it’s time you shunned the text in the book, the learning in the class and the knowing of the facts. It is time you showed the world (of kids) your true form:
Knock, knock
Who’s there?
Physics teacher?
Teacher who?
Whoo Dooo!

And as your children discover the world of magic – in almost everything around them – they will become not physicists, not scientists, but magicians.

Invite children to become magicians. Invite them to bring magic tricks. Even better, invent magic tricks based on what they observe around them. After all, this is exactly what all magicians till date do – use physics to bewilder you.

They use harmonics to create sounds, optics to throw illusions, mechanics to make things disappear and re-appear, properties of matter to show contrary actions and so on. In some ways they are more physicists and presenters than magicians or maybe that is what magicians are supposed to be anyway.

Try this – announce a magic show, call an audience, ask them to wear a black coat and carry a sheet of paper with them. Now ask each to tear or cut (use scissors if they want) a star out of this paper.

Ask them to write their name in the middle of the star.

Next fold all the star’s triangular petals inside. Now it no more looks like a star – rather all its pointed ends are pointing inside.

Announce, “You-the-magician is trapped inside the star!” Invite each magician to say, along with you, a magic mantra to the folded star. All magical mantras work – so go ahead and invent your own!

Now put around the room a few dinner plates with some water in them and ask each magician to gently place their star on the water in any plate (a plate can have multiple stars – just ensure that they don’t touch each other.)

Ask them to keep chanting the magical mantra and observe what the mantra does.

If by the end of this exercise, each member of your audience thinks that he/she is a magician – he/she is actually right. We are all magicians and life is just magical. All we teachers need to do is rub the lamp and let the genie out!

The authors run an open unschool called Aarohi and invite all readers to visit and see how open learning can be an amazing way to work with children. They also conduct training retreats and online training for teachers and parents. Visit www.aarohilife.org.