Sorcar with his family at home. Picture by Aranya Sen

For kids, summer holidays are magical anyway. And what better way to spend them than learning magic? Towards the end of this month, 50 lucky schoolchildren are set to find that out at Nehru Children’s Museum, where magician P.C. Sorcar (junior) will share some tricks of the magical trade with them.

The three-day workshop would be held between May 28 and 30 at the museum. Lending her father a helping hand would be Sorcar’s eldest daughter Maneka. It will be a first for the duo and Sorcar individually, too, as he believes that the right atmosphere for teaching magic was lacking until now.

“Our society still does not seem prepared to appreciate magic as a high form of art,” is a complaint from the master magician, who considers magic to be “the romantic side of theatrical arts”.

But the younger section of society seems to think otherwise. “We received a tremendous response for the workshop with hundreds of applications,” said Sudip Srimal, secretary of the museum. “It was at the insistence of P.C. Sorcar that we had to keep the batch-size down to 50; otherwise we would have taken in at least double that number of children,” he added.

The Sorcars are not charging anything for the lessons. All that the children need to invest in is a magic kit, worth Rs 1,500 that would be supplied by their teachers.

For Sorcar, it is not only the first chance to share some of his secrets with children, but also an opportunity to catch them young with a mix of magic and morals. “Our moral values are eroding. To stem that erosion, children must be the first ones we should educate,” he felt. The fact that the response has been good from only the English-medium schools is also something that he feels sad about.

The magic workshop is a part of a series of such workshops that Nehru Children’s Museum is conducting this summer. Others include workshops on music, creative dance, drama and ceramic painting, conducted by the likes of Lopamudra Mitra, Indrani Sen, Ramaprasad Banik, Mamata Shankar and Thankamani Kutty.

More magical stuff may be on the way soon. “Rabindra Bharati University authorities have requested me to consider opening a course on magic,” Sorcar signed off.