How It Began

A lot of posts have had this title. But this one is different. This is about It.

In the beginning, there was Nothing. Oops, sorry, not even Nothing with an uppercase ‘N’. Let me start again.

In the beginning, there was nothing. Then God said “Let there be Light!”. And there was Light. Then God looked around and saw a lot of Empty Space and set about creating Creation. And so, the twin crafts of Engineering and Interior Designing were born. And God, donning the cap of Engineer, started the work of creation. To help with the interior designing, he created Angels.

It took several million combinations before he got things right. He was a downright sloppy engineer. At the end of the sixth day, one of Angels noticed something amiss. When he spoke, God confessed – “Yeah I know, the Light period actually lasts only half the time I intended it to!”
Angel: “So what are you gonna do now?”
God: “Well, I’m too tired now, and besides tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ll just call it a day.”

This was when God created Man – in his own likeness – another downright sloppy engineer. This is an explanation of why men run to fix plumbing jobs whenever they get a chance, and in all probability, end up messing the water pipe worse than before. It also gives me a good excuse for shoddy work.

The Angels, tired with His antics, told God that the ribs inside Adam didn’t confirm to Feng-Shui. So God took out one of the ribs, putting in a wall hanging instead, and made Eve. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out very well because the Snake coaxed them into believing that Adam had constipation and should eat fresh fruit to get rid of it. This fruit was from the Tree of Knowledge, and gave Man the intelligence to rise from sloppy engineerdom to not-so-sloppy inventordom. God was enraged because all this while he had thought the apple tree was just another Feng-Shui artifact planted by the Angels from the interior designing department, and threw everybody out of the Garden.

Several million years later – after the pyramids were built, but before cellphones with cameras made their appearance – Thomas Alva Edison realized that God had been sloppy and day really lasted only for half a day. So, he tried several thousand different combinations again.

Thus was made the bulb – a modern engineering marvel!

The moral of the story is that mythological chronicles are long and pointless, and culminate anticlimactically, or leave behind more than enough room for sequels.

For example, this story ends with a bulb, but talks about camera cellphones.

Read the Silmarillion or any of the Wheel of Time books for further insight.