"One high school teacher once told me that Śankara said that God became the world. In the beginning there was God and then he created the world out of himself. So God became the world. And now there is no God. It is exactly like making idli out of rice. The rice is gone; only idli is there. Later, I repeated this as Śankara's philosophy to someone and he laughed so hard that I knew that there was some mistake in what I had said. But I didn't know what the mistake was and he didn't correct me either."