IT BHU, Hypnosis and Rahul Garg

End of Feb, 2000 , IT BHU, now IIT BHU, the auditorium is packed, I am on the stage sweating, panicking and  wondering what to do. And I looked at Rahul Garg.

There are around 30 students lying on the stage in deep hypnotic trance(whom I had hypnotised) and there are 20 students different parts of the auditorium lying down on the floor in a trance(I have no clue why they went into a trance). More and more people in the auditorium is falling down into a trance. 

And I am on the stage wondering what’s happening. 

BHU was hosting the National Youth Festival, SPARSH and Rahul Garg , then a student now a senior leader with Boston Scientific had invited me to do a Hypnosis Demonstration. 

I had done this twice before at IT BHU but this time students were from all over India as it's a National Youth festival.  I think Rahul had also organised a Hypnosis workshop for the students in the previous year.

I usually do an introduction to hypnosis but Professor, SK Sharma from Mechanical felt that we should explain in Hindi this time as they might not understand English and offered to help knowing my Hindi speaking abilities. 

SK Sharma was part of the earlier Hypnosis demos I had done there and knew exactly what all I say and do. He was a great supporter.

So he did the introduction, and told that they will start falling down when they listen to my voice. I remember him saying I am an expert on "Sammohan Vidya" . After his introduction to hypnosis and what to expect from the program, I invited around 30 students to the stage.

I made them stand in a circle and started rapid hypnosis induction technique. They started falling back into a trance in the safe hands of Rahul and his team. 

If you are not familiar with stage hypnosis, you might not be able to visualise this . While I do not have the videos of the crazy stage hypnosis stuff I used to do at IIT Delhi, Mumbai, BITS Pilani, IIM Ahmedabad and IIM Kolkata, this is a tone down version that gives you an idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FVRkj6sbBc

While I was searching for some old articles or information on these shows I used to do at IITs, I came across this 1997 article in Business Standard.

Now you have an idea what I mean by people falling into a trance and you know that they are literally falling down ..

So here I am with a bunch of people on the stage who are in a deep trance and people from the audience are jut falling down into a trance creating huge panic among the audience ..

Students started carrying people who are fallen down in the auditorium to the stage.

Now we have a problem or I have a problem.

I need to quickly figure out whats happening, and need to do something about this or else half of the audience might fall down from their seats. Then I am not sure what would happen..

Rahul was there to help along with Professor SK Sharma. We decided to stop the program, put the curtain down, get the people who fell in to the trace in the auditorium to the stage.

While Rahul and the Professor managed the audience, I worked with all the people who were in the trance to get them back or "waking them up", in the hypnosis language.

The professor's introduction worked like a hypnosis suggestion and some people in audience believed that they would go into a trance. When they saw the volunteers on the stage are falling into a trance, that reinforced their belief and when couple of people from the audience went into a trance, that again reinforced the belief of others.

The next day Hindi news papers in Varanasi wrote something like this on the front page, "The hypnotist had to stop the demonstration because everyone in the audience was getting into a trance".

I kept in touch with Rahul, or rather he kept in touch with me. I had an opportunity to visit him when he joined ISB as I was doing a workshop for the executive team of Dr Reddys and the workshop was at ISB.

A recent conversation with Rahul triggered this memory. So here cementing that memory, Rahul..