What went wrong?

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 Romania caught my eye. You don’t read much about Romania in the news, so I clicked on it. The news itself was not interesting but on the side of the page, there was a list of other news on Romania that had previously appeared. There was one on the tourism potential of the Carpathian mountain region. I clicked on that one. As I was reading that, I got more interested in Transylvania and did a quick search. After several pages, I found a site which had some history on the region. You know, Dracula and all that. As I had already read a lot on both the historical and the fictional figure, I was more interested in the fact that there had been a few archeological digs recently, uncovering ancient Dacian communities, the forefathers of the Romanians. Several clicks later I found myself reading a relatively recent piece of news about a mysterious burial ground they had uncovered somewhere near the city of Brasov. The story mentioned that archeologists had stumbled upon a burial site where they found items that were quite unlike anything else they had found before. They hadn’t been able to date the graves yet, as the site seemed to have been in almost constant use since the arrival of the first settlers in the area. Some graves looked like they could be two thousand years old, while some others looked no older than Medieval. This, they said is quite extraordinary and unprecedented, but maybe further studies will narrow the time period down to a couple of centuries. All this was interesting, of course, but not so much for me to lose any sleep over. I did lose sleep over it though, but not because of the difficulty archeologists’ faced over the dating of the site. There was a small bit of other information mentioned in the article. It was that all of the graves had one thing in common: All the dead were buried with an egg-shaped black stone in their right hands. These stones were all the same in their shape, size and shiny nature, no matter how old the particular grave was, further confusing the archeologists. As of the writing of the article, they had not been able to determine the source or use of these peculiar black stones. And that was all there was to the article. After reading it, I realized that I was quite tired and quickly went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep for a while as somehow the image of a skeleton holding a black and shiny egg-shaped piece of stone kept coming to me. I couldn’t shake it off. When I finally fell asleep I dreamt of these stones. I still remembered them when I woke up the next morning.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, my life had changed irreversibly.