Past-life regression and future-life progression are two wonder therapies enthralling seekers today. Can the yesterday and tomorrow of our life be known today? Can it help us understand this present moment?
Indian painter Vijender Sharma
seeks truth through the 'reality' of illusion
His
studio is a giggle at hypocrisy.
Beside a snazzy music system, a human
skull grins through a twisted piece of glass. Above a shelf stacked with priceless
books on art sits a Buddha wearing Ray-Ban. Like an excited child showing off
his latest toy, Vijender Sharma points at the Buddha and says: "You know, Buddha
saw something in his way. But look what we've done. We've colored his vision.
He now views things the way we want him to. Funny, isn't it?"
Funny?
Indeed. Behind every startlingly alive painting of Sharma's lurks a barely suppressed
guffaw at the ways of the world—be it a politician wearing a joker's make-up,
an eyeless vendor of countless eyes or an umbrella hanging alongside a saffron
niche in the wall. Every painting is disturbingly lifelike, seeping effortlessly
out of the drawn frame into the here and now. "I don't want you to just look at
a painting and move on," says Sharma. "I want you to become a part of the work,
feel its intensity in every pore of your being."
Picture this: a woman
stares at you with eyes that hold the world's sorrows, beseeches you with hands
that hold a bouquet of flowers and a razor-sharp pair of scissors. Love and hate,
pain and beauty—all come together with a starkness that is almost real.
Almost real. Almost. Just as you think you have recovered from the 'gimmick'
of three-dimensionality, you feel stunned anew by the truth within. A truth that
is straining against clinging sheaths of polythene, tied down by thin red cords.
You want to reach out, rip off the sheaths and free Everyman straining for the
horizon. But you can't. For it is all art, all of it.
But then, isn't
that the essence of art, after all? An eternal striving for the truth, an unending
yearning for the ultimate. And then, once the artist reaches his goal, there is
no art, no paint, nothing. Just a pair of eyes riveted to a sacred niche, looking
at the world beyond and chortling with glee.
Sharma paints for a living,
and he makes no bones about this. His exhibitions are invariably sold out. But
he has not lost his talent in the lure of lucre. His themes are commonplace and
intense—corruption, hypocrisy, materialism, death, spirituality, love. No
mindless abstractions or didactic strokes. Sharma is a simple painter who gives
simple meanings to complex paintings.
"I seek solutions," he says, solemnly.
"I seek the truth." Then, suddenly he leaps over to the skull. A smile waltzes
within his grizzly beard as the impish painter says: "This is what we are, after
all. This is the simple starkness of our lives. But look how we run away from
this, frightened to see our own selves. Funny, isn't it?"
His
studio is a giggle at hypocrisy. 
