#beyond self

Give when- it’s difficult...

Give to- the deserving as well as the perceived undeserving...

Give when- your own suffering is at its greatest...

Give- in that moment when there’s seemingly nothing left to give...

Give when- almost unbearable is your own pain...

Volume I: Chapter IX

NEW FICTION:

He stood in the moment, in one single moment. He was all fury-glazed eyes, mumbling lips, ripped shirt, bare flexing feet. Imagine the world, he thought. Imagine the world coloured by a twisted soul. Imagine a world spanned between an angel's peach fuzz cheeks and the bitter stumps of their withered feet, a world spanned by a god's sapphire seamless eyes and their rotted down fingers. Imagine the space between a baby's first cry and an old man's last whimper. Imagine that! Imagine it hard and real! The span of space between, always between. The moment, his moment, moved to another, and then another. But fury stayed with him - it was his comfort, his solace, his thing. He kept imagining, and the world kept turning. The twisted soul kept colouring, and his fury kept on pumping.

NEW FICTION:

He wrote the words down - slow and easy. He reduced his breathing, paced his heartbeat, calmed his flickering eyelids - all to follow the rhythm of his words, all to follow the shifts in illusion and perception - from flashes and flickers - to words wrote down. His words were not etched in granite or steel, they could be scribbled over, forcibly changed, erased, burnt to broken bone, ash and cinder. But somehow, someway, once his words hit paper, once they were eased out of his head, they were in a way exorcised from his body, they had to make their own way, they were their own entity. Whether they came back to haunt him, or whether he never heard from them again - it was up to them, no longer him.

NEW FICTION:

He had no name, had no real face. He was a mixture of shadow and empty life story. He stared unblinking at the wall opposite him - he saw nothing, but saw more than - a blank face, a blank face with shadows. He moved his head slowly, in comfort-rocking that was his own. It helped - colours shifted, lights flickered. He picked up the pace - his head was empty, but his hands stood in front of him, his fingers sporting shapes that couldn't be, but seemed more real than. His shifting head became a blur as he rocked in double-fast time. He saw the screams on the wall, saw the sneers, the laughter, the tears. The wall was the distorted mirror, the life lived hard and often. His head was a whirl - lost its shape, everything was fading into something else again - a maw, an open wound, a gateway. His fingers still sporting shapes that couldn't be, but were more than real, shifted their focus. He was now between worlds, between worlds with no identity - no name, no face - just where he was, where he wanted, needed to be.

NEW FICTION:

So he said: "Look at me, I'm a hit and run dressed as a lamb. Literally, I am a drive-thru dressed as a fucking lamb of god!" He swayed purposely and fuel-induced, in the road - in the middle of the road between non-existent traffic. His shirt was open, flowing out behind him through a slow motion breeze. His open hands caressed the air he breathed, the air he danced between. His feet - tied to the tarmac, switched from a twisted self-fandango, to a morose tango-for-one. He was a moment that no one needed to share, that no one ever could.

Beyond Self –an art exhibition par excellence

By Meera Ahuja

It is always a pleasure and enlightening experience to meet Professor Ravinder Sharma.

I recently met him at the annual exhibition organised by him to celebrate the joyous occasion of Mahashivrartri.  Professor Sharma, a former professor at the Government College of  Arts, Chandigarh and who now runs Ravinder Sharma Art Academy, dedicated the exhibition to his mother.

The themes of…