Divya
The arrest of Rhea Chakraborty awoke a wide range of support within Bollywood for the young actress.
Now, Twinkle Khanna oorf Mrs Funnybones wrote a column for TOI where she compared Rhea’s media trial to the magic trick of magician P C Sorcar in 1956 where he illusioned slicing a girl in half.
Khanna commenced her piece by writing, “In 1956, P C Sorcar, the greatest magician in Indian history, was seen murdering a girl on television. In front of thousands of viewers, he sliced her in half like she was a sausage roll.“
“When the BBC show ended, the channel was inundated with phone calls. The last thing horrified viewers saw was a hapless Sorcar trying to revive the young girl. ‘Is she really dead?’ the hundreds of viewers who called in wanted to know. The next day, he made the front page and became a household name in England. It was a masterful trick to leave the audience with that singular image — of a slaughtered young girl on their screens,” she continues.
“They took a young woman and cut her in half. They sliced through her T-shirt, one that stated ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, let’s smash the patriarchy, me and you’, the blade going into her flesh, her very life draining away before a live audience of millions. What do these magicians tell themselves when the camera is switched off I wonder? Do they justify it as mere collateral damage — one life in exchange for entertaining and distracting 1.3 billion for months,” Twinkle shares her analogy.
A day ago, Twinkle took to Instagram and shared a cartoon of the same analogy where she compares media to magic. She captioned it, “Magic is the art of deception and 60 yrs after Sorcar was seen sawing a girl in half on television, our illusionists are busy trying to replicate his act. What are they trying to distract us from? My bit this week.”
In her piece for TOI, Khanna also states, “Sorcar was a skilled master of illusions. Dipty Dey, the girl he seemed to have sawed through on television, had not suffered so much as a scratch. Our illusionists, on the other hand, trying to wedge their odious, large feet, built for trampling and not treading lightly, into Sorcar’s fine shoes, tried to replicate this act. This was no trick though, and there were no safety protocols, no hidden switch that would let her escape unharmed.”
