Aayush Arya is India Editor and Apps Co-Editor at I’ve attended P.C. Sorkar Jr.’s magic shows on two separate occasions and I found that he mostly kept reusing the same tricks through all those years. There were a few new ones in the mix the second time I saw it, specially because he brought he daughter along this time, but for the most part they were exactly the same, repeated over and over, honed through years and years of practice.
One of his signature acts is where he places a jug of water in a corner of the stage and keeps returning to it after performing a trick or two, at irregular intervals. He scoops it up and pours out the water into a bucket. When the jug is emptied, he tilts it back and then forward again, only to pour a fresh stream of water into the bucket below. The bucket steadily gets filled but the seemingly bottomless jug never runs out of the clear liquid.
He calls it the “Water of India” (which is an allusion to the virtually infinite population of our country, I guess). I’m here to tell you that I seem to have a source for that very same water in my house too!
Whenever the taps in our house run dry, necessitating the need the switch on the electrical water pump that pulls water from the well in our backyard and replenishes the water reserve on the roof, there is this one tap in the dining hall that never runs out. How it manages to outlast all its other counterparts, I’ll probably never know, but I’ve come to regard it as the “Water of India” myself—P.C. Sorkar would be pleased.
