 "Lior Suchard")
A pair of spectacles is rolling on the dining table of its own accord; the spoon has just been bent with a soft touch; the stewards at Palladium's Mekong restaurant are having a whale of a time at our expense; and our guest for the lunch is flashing a winning smile.
This is not exactly the usual setting for a Lunch with BS but "usual" is a word that doesn't seem to exist in Lior Suchard's dictionary. Known all over the world as a mentalist, Suchard, who prefers to call himself a supernatural entertainer, says even out-of-the-box thinking is passe for him since he threw the box right at the beginning of his rather unusual career. We notice the huge ring on his forefinger with "S" inscribed on it, and Suchard says the "S" stands for Superman - his all-time favourite hero. It's easy to take many of his claims with a bagful of salt, but we have heard and read a lot about how he has impressed people such as Steve Ballmer, Bill Clinton, Barbra Streisand, Mukesh Ambani, and so on.
The 32-year-old who has come with his promotion manager in tow, is used to meeting ordinary mortals like us, too, since apart from private corporate shows, he holds regular stage shows in 49 countries. The reason for the spectacles doing a little jig of their own or the bent spoon is simple. "I am told you don't believe in what I do," Suchard had told us before asking us for the spectacles. After the impromptu show of his, we are reminded of his assertion in his book, Mind Reader, that while standing in front of an audience, he feels like a puppet master, holding all the strings of communication and persuasion.
We ask him whether he is just another magician or a trickster. Suchard is clearly used to such questions and says it's all about transfer of positive energy, or "chi", which involves extreme focus of his thoughts to gather and send energy. "I use my mind like a laser beam. It's all about mind over matter, of the purest kind," Suchard, who was voted the best mentalist in the world by German TV channel Pro 7, says.
Sensing that his rather long speech has gone over our heads, the "mind-reader" chooses to rely on the demonstration effect to impress his latest "puppets", as the starters - chicken and prawn dim sums - lie unattended. He scribbles something on a piece of paper and withdraws it to his chest. "Can you tell me a two-digit number?" he said. "Seventy two," we answer. The winner's smile is back again on Suchard's face as he shows us the page. It had 72 written on it.
There is more. Suchard says he must do something to impress business journalists like us and asks us to write the name of a Sensex stock while he is looking the other way. After we are through, he says the name of the stock has something to do with "movement" and Tatas, and then proceeds to mention Tata Motors. He had guessed it right.
A top scientist at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research had told us in the morning that it's not possible to read other people's mind. "Both the US and Russia spent billions of dollars during the Cold War to understand mind-reading, but both failed," he had said. Despite that warning, our initial scepticism is slowly giving way to a willing suspension of disbelief as the infotainer (as he describes himself) says he has the ability to influence others' thoughts and to extract information from their mind. The evening before our lunch, that talent was in full flow when Suchard had some of Mumbai's top money managers eating out of his hands at an investor conference organised by Edelweiss. After he rattled off ATM numbers of random people from the audience and gave out the names of the first loves of many, he was treated like a rock star by the charmed business executives.
But no matter how hard you try to rationalise his act, it's a challenge to explain how he does what he does. But we have no doubt about one thing: that the man is a marketing genius. For example: he says he just loves India because people here are very warm and know how to have fun. The unsaid reason, of course, is that he holds almost a fourth of his 200 shows annually in this country. He is going back to Israel only to come back within a week to hold three back-to-back shows.
Suchard obviously has a keen sense of humour as well. When we explain that the format of Lunch with BS demands that we host him, Suchard jokes he wished he had invited some close friends. He is a bit hesitant about choosing the main course since he finds even the blandest of Indian food a bit too spicy, and settles for sea bass with lemon sauce. We order jasmine rice and duck red curry.
He was born in Haifa, Tel Aviv, the youngest of three sons of an entrepreneur. "I was seven when I first started realising I could do this. My two brothers were my guinea pigs. I'd ask them to think of numbers or have me guess in which hand they are hiding something," he says. His parents knew that their youngest son is "different" but never forced him to take a conventional career route.
He made good use of his special qualities in many other ways, too. For example, he had dumped his first girlfriend just after a month of their affair since he caught her thinking of someone else. His second girlfriend whom he had met at age 16 is now his wife and the couple lives in Jerusalem. She was working at a cafe in Tel Aviv where Suchard was a frequent customer. "I guessed her phone number correctly and started calling her," he says.
Apart from corporate stage shows, he is regularly invited by Israeli companies as an observer in the interviews of senior executives and he has cracked a few cases of corporate espionage. He is, however, unwilling to name any company on grounds of confidentiality.
The only thing he doesn't know how to do is predict the future, unlike many of the "godmen" in India. That submission, of course, doesn't stop him from recounting a meeting with Sachin Tendulkar before a crucial match of last year's Indian Premier League. Suchard had "stuck his neck out" and told the Little Master that he would score more than 70. Tendulkar had scored 74. They have kept in touch since then.
His promotion-manager eggs him on to talk about an interesting incident at the Ambani house, but Suchard quickly stops him to say he isn't allowed to talk about "private things in public".
He attributes a lot of his so-called special powers to intuition, which everybody has, but in varying degrees. For example, the two planes that crashed through the Twin Towers in 2001 were 71 per cent and 81 per cent empty. "It seems like a lot of people cancelled their flights that day. How do you explain this?" he says.
Grabbing attention is clearly child's play for him - a reason he is invited for many brand launches by some of the biggest global companies. And he would clearly be worth every penny. For example, at a clients' meeting of Swatch, Suchard called eight "randomly selected" people on stage and stopped the watches of all of them, except one who was wearing a Swatch watch. "I could have stopped the Swatch watch also, but did not do it deliberately to make a statement that it's almost impossible to make a Swatch watch stop. The audience just loved it," he says. At another BMW event, he drove the car blindfolded on a busy street just to make a statement that "you can drive a BMW even blindfolded".
Why doesn't he use his considerable talent to make big bucks on the stock markets or casinos? Suchard is unruffled and says he is not allowed to bet big in the Las Vegas casinos, specially the Blackjack card game. The security at Las Vegas casinos know him and keep an eye on him. "But sometimes I win and sometimes the casino loses," he says with a smile. As for stocks, he is a regular, long-term investor in US and Israeli company stocks.
His manager reminds him about a TV interview he is due to attend and Suchard leaves abruptly after giving us a copy of his book. However, he ignores our request to stop our watches just the same way he had stopped those at the Swatch event.
We notice the "Be positive" message above his signature on the book. That's perhaps the mind-reader's way of telling us to banish all the negative thoughts about him.
