The FTC auditorium, Karachi resonated with applause at the end of a 90-minute show during which mentalist Shaheer Khan astounded everyone with his skills and tricks to guessing the unknown. He calls them “extremely educated guesses” and says that he “can read human behaviour which helps in predicting a person’s next move”, but the way he puts up an entertaining and awe-inspiring show leaves anyone guessing as to how someone can be this acurate all the time.

During the last show of his series The Other Side, the mind scientist played different games with the audience during which he would guess they are thinking of. This included card games, and a few think-of-a-number type interactions from the spectators. It was quite evident from their dumbfounded expressions that Karachiites hadn’t witnesed anything quite like it. Even a skeptic sitting in the audience couldn’t help but say toward the end, “I thought this was scripted, but now I know it isn’t.” He knows how to keep the audience on the edge of their seats, that’s the mark of a great performer. It’s not just about your tricks, it is equally about how entertaining of a show you put up. One could see he has a knack for it when he guessed a name thought by a lady in the audience to be Brad Pitt instead of Chris Pratt. Shaheer had asked her to write the name she had thought on a piece of paper and kept in her hand, folded before. He apologised to everyone for getting it wrong, but by the time the lady went back to her seat and he asked her to unfold the paper and check again, the writing on it had ‘magically’ changed to his own guess. Did he do that on purpose? How did he do any of that? No one seemed to care! As if the show wasn’t enough to boggle our minds as it is, the entertainer forced everyone on their feet when at the end he read from a paper rolled into a ball, that stayed in front of the unsuspecting audience in the entire duration, the accurate predictions of all the events that happened during the show, which he had already written on the paper before the show had even happened. Shaheer Khan will be back with a brand new series of shows after Eid-ul-Azha, and we can’t wait! – Sidra Khan