I’d like to think that I’ve done nothing wrong. But some may suggest (and they may have a point) that I’ve been the architect of my own predicament. And they might add that it was my curiosity that did me in. I know, I’d left that part out about me. That’s because I know we're not supposed to be curious about things that have got nothing to do with our small existence. About things that do not, should not concern us. It’s not the Renaissance any more, you know. Who cares about the cosmic background radiation, the art of playing Go, the history of the Roman Empire, the latest in String Theory, the secrets of the pyramids, extrasolar planet search, how bees find their way back to the hive or the Nazca Lines? I know, some do. What I mean is, who cares about them all? I am no scientist or anything. My day job is about counting numbers. But I have an insatiable curiosity to know.
As a kid, I used to read encyclopedias when my peers were reading comics. I was not a nerd or anything. I played Cowboys and Indians or joined in Atari tournaments, just like every other kid. So I grew up thinking there’s nothing particularly wrong with my personal interest in consuming all the information I could get my hands on. I'd already listened to my parents and chose the path most travelled, hadn’t I? But yet, I kept alive my curiosity about the universe we live in. And the internet didn’t help. Here was a medium which put the whole of mankind’s knowledge, ideas and sheer junk at my fingertips. It would not be too much to say that it is the world wide web that caused all this mess.
Knowledge, as better men than me have pointed out (and as most of our leaders would concur), can be a dangerous thing. And you may have read in some cheesy spy thriller that there is such a thing as knowing too much. I know that now. I know things now that I wish I hadn’t. I know that most of what I used to take for granted, what you take for granted, is not true. And knowing this is, well, painful.
You know how sometimes as you ‘surf’ on the internet you click on one link and then you are taken to another web site and then you click on a link there and it takes you somewhere else and so an and so forth and after several hours you find yourself reading something completely unrelated to what you had started out with? That happens to me a lot. One thing leads to another. That’s a fair and simple way to explain how this peculiar situation that I now find myself in all started: One thing simply lead to another.
On one ordinary evening, after an ordinary day, I came home from work, ate a fast dinner consisting of a cold turkey sandwich and a slice of tiramisu, I seated myself in front of the computer, first checking my e-mail account and then reading the news on my favorite news sites, a pattern which had repeated itself thousands of times before. But on this particular evening, as I was scanning the news sites, a short piece about
Unbeknownst to me at the time, my life had changed irreversibly.