Rashik Mohtasin spent years building things for a living. Then he left that behind and started doing something harder: Getting inside people’s heads! Rashik Mohtasin goes by Magic Razik. It is a stage name that does exactly what it needs to and announces the act before he has said a word. What it does not prepare you for is the person behind it. He is measured, unhurried, the kind of man who talks about building daily habits the same way he talks about making a room go quiet.

Mentalism is a strange choice for a career. Magic, at least, has props. Cards, boxes, scarves, things you can point to after and say, “That is how it was done.” Mentalism has none of that. The trick appears to be happening inside your mind. Or, if he is doing it right, inside yours.

He has been doing this since he was six. Still not tired of the look on people’s faces when it works.

“I loved that I could do it and keep the secret,” he says. “No one else was doing it.”

Not a boast. Just a fact.

A boy and a lobby in Hong Kong

Rashik’s father travelled frequently for business. When he was about six, he was taken to Hong Kong. Inside a hotel, a performer came through the lobby with a deck of cards. He was too young, the memory too worn. What he has kept is not the trick but the feeling of watching it.

“I don’t even remember it clearly,” he says. “But somehow it stuck.”

His parents helped. Both of them, he says, are pranksters, the kind of household where misdirection was already a fixture before he had a name for what he was learning. His father, specifically, is the person he points to first when asked who shaped him.

Performer from birth

The first trick was the remove-the-thumb illusion. Simple, the kind of thing children learn in minutes and grandparents pretend to be baffled by. What began as simply showing tricks to friends and guests became the foundation for Magic Razik. “I wanted to stand out during school shows by doing something no one else was doing,” Rashik explained as he reflected on his beginnings.

“I loved the fact that I could gatekeep the tricks when someone asked me how I did it,” he joked, explaining why he pursued magic.

Engineering his way into magic and mentalism

Before any of this became a career, Rashik became an engineer. He did his undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom and his master’s in Australia and worked across the UK, Australia, and Bangladesh for years, doing steady, well-paid, and legible work.

“I fulfilled my parents’ dream before pursuing mine,” Rashik explained when asked about his decision to become a full-time magician and mentalist.

Then came COVID, and a decision that, from the outside, looked questionable.

“I decided to post one reel a day, no matter what,” Rashik said while explaining the beginning of his journey. Starting small and slow, rather than an all-in mindset, is detrimental, Rashik opined.

In true engineer fashion, he focused on the finer details because he believes in compounding effects rather than an all-or-nothing approach.

Every show is tailored

Rashik does not perform a fixed set. Every live show is rebuilt around the room, the client, the company, the occasion, and the people in the chairs. He believes that reading the room and improvising accordingly is key to a memorable act.

He stated that he hardly mentions what act he is doing in order to keep the audience on its toes and engaged throughout.

And sometimes, despite all the preparation, a show simply does not land. It bombs, as performers say; the energy is off, the room does not respond, and the whole thing falls flat. It happens. Rashik does not dwell on it.

When a show goes wrong, he stays focused on the act. No post-mortem spiral, no replaying what went wrong at two in the morning. He moves on, almost by policy.

The same logic applies to his online work. He does not read the comments on his posts. Not the good ones, not the bad ones. None of them. He says he always focuses on the positives, both in life and in his performances.

The performances that stayed

Channel 7, one of Australia’s biggest television networks, took him all over Australia, the Gold Coast, Sydney and a few different states. Back home, there was Ityadi. If you grew up in Bangladesh, that one requires no explanation. He says he will remember both of them all his life.

Where to find him

Rashik’s content is everywhere on Instagram. Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, under the name of “Magic Razik.” Magic Razik’s content is hard to scroll past and even harder to stop watching, with nearly 3.5 million views on the platforms.

By Zawad Arif Arian

Photo: Courtesy