-Update-
My story


I was a kid raised up in a brahmin Hindu family, its one of those most 'pure' casts you could find in the Hindu society, offcourse every branch of the brahmin cast claims to be such but 'Chatterjee' or 'Chattopadhyay' s are the top ones - or so I ve been told.
So with that backdrop you can pretty much say that I had the most stringiest of religious teachings one could ever get.

Being a brahmin kid, traditionally you have to go through a ritual or a sort of rite of passage called 'poita' in bengali or Upanayana in sanskrit. This has to be done before the age of 15 and no earlier than the age of 7.

So I remember as the days went by my parents were beginning to talk more & more about this rite of passage how my father had to go bald and stay with a step mother (part of the ritual - no that mother has no relationship with the father of the pupil) and has to beg around and eat only boiled vegetables through out these days. Obviously this was getting kinda scary for me, I was already the odd fat kid in school and the thought of getting more attention because of a bald head was nerve wracking for me. Among all the discussions that my father and I had I remember him vaguely mentioning that only when I go through this ritual would I be called a purified soul reborn on earth worthy of going to heaven.

That got me thinking, it was a bewildering fact for me which I couldnt get my head around. I and only all the other brahmin kids had a free ticket to heaven while the rest are automatically considered unworthy ? What about my best friend who had a surname of Moitra ? What about that girl I had a crush on with a surname of Kundu, wait a second, "what about mom?" I asked my father.
I remember this distinctly as my father explained to me that girls dont have a caste, they belong to the man they marry and since my mother was married to him she will be worthy of going to heaven with him. But what if she married a muslim ?? Dont remember if I ever asked this back then but I certainly did have this thought from around the same time.

This did not sit well with me, I began questioning every aspect of 'Poita' my tantrums got so bad that my parents eventually considered to not force me to go through this ritual. However, my tantrums back then were fueled by the desire of eating chicken.

But this small victory of not getting the poita was a good enough spark in my mind to raise questions on all aspects of religion.
Then at the age of nine, I got the greatest gift I ever thought I could get in my life; Cable TV and with it the Discovery channel.

Hence began my journey into the world of science, off course we had physics / chemistry / maths in our schools but for the first time all of it actually meant something to me. I was fascinated by how gravity works. I was spellbound when I first saw an animated version of the milky way. I found out that there was a real person named Pythagoras. Basically cable TV was the fuel that my spark required to become a full fledged atheist.

.. and that is my story.