One of my earliest curiosities must be tugging at my mother’s wrapper in a tenacious effort to get her to answer a simple question: who created God? I don’t remember how we got there, or how young I was, but I remember her replying “Well, you can’t understand now. Nobody understands. Just content yourself with the fact that He created the world. How He himself got created is beyond us.” I found it very unsatisfactory and resolved that she was not the one to trust with the big questions trolling my very young mind. Since then, or since many months before, the idea of God, Christianity and the way the world was formed, or will end, took on a sharp turn and ceased to make as much sense to me as it should have, considering the amount of exposure I had. It however never failed to keep me questioning, looking for right answers.

If God created us, and the world, then someone or something must have created him – I thought – or it all makes no sense. Of course, I later encountered evolution and its sharp contrast with the story of the Garden of Eden – except of course we agree that the Garden came after very many years of evolution and is just a metaphor for the very beginning of consciousness. The idea of an all-knowing, all powerful priest/pastor/preacher never made sense to me either as it always sought to cast them as possessing of something bigger and purer than us ordinary folks. It was an unnecessary distraction, as all I always wanted to know after meeting any one of those holy men was the ordinary detail of their lives. That always yielded enough to justify my constant skepticism.

And so one day in 1994, some rumour started that the world was going to end, and the whole country – at least my circle of friends – went into a frenzy. Then the day went by and nothing happened, as we already guessed it would not. It however confirmed what I’d always thought: no one knew jack about anything, but it didn’t stop them from making things up that suited their imagination. In this case however, mother had a different nugget of brilliance: “Rapture is individual, and it comes to you when your time on earth is up.” Finally, that made some sense. I had got the right response to throw at the silly circle of impressionable friends who believed that the world was going to end and we were all going to go flying into the sky all at once – in spite of time zone differences (This bit made it seem a little unfair, in my opinion. No doubt, the right time of the rapture would definitely fall during the sleeping hours of people in some countries.) In any case, that was that.