If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?

If I could erase one event from history, my first thought would honestly be nothing.

History is complicated. Every event is connected to another, and I don’t think we can ever fully know what the consequences of changing one moment would be.

But then I thought of Nalanda.

The destruction of Nalanda University.

Nalanda was not simply an ancient university. It was one of the great centres of learning in ancient India, attracting scholars and students from different parts of Asia. It was a place where knowledge, philosophy, literature, science and different intellectual traditions came together.

And when I think about what was lost, I don’t think only about the buildings.

I think about the manuscripts.

The texts.

The ideas.

The knowledge that may have existed there and that we may never be able to recover.

There are many popular stories about exactly how Nalanda was destroyed, how long its libraries burned, and how many manuscripts were lost. Some of these claims are difficult to establish with certainty today. So I don’t want to romanticise the tragedy with numbers that history itself cannot firmly confirm.

But we do know that Nalanda suffered destruction, and that the loss of such an important centre of learning was enormous.

And sometimes I wonder:

What if all that knowledge had survived?

What if generations of scholars had continued to study those manuscripts?

What if more of those ideas had travelled through time?

What if we had access today to texts that disappeared centuries ago?

I don’t know whether India would necessarily have become more developed or more advanced if Nalanda had survived. History doesn’t work that simply.

But I do believe that preserving knowledge gives a civilization possibilities.

And perhaps that is what makes the destruction of Nalanda so painful to think about.

A building can be rebuilt.

A library can be rebuilt.

But once an idea, a manuscript or a piece of knowledge disappears completely, we may never know what it could have contributed to the world.

So if I really had the power to erase one event from history, I would erase that loss.

Not because I believe it would have created a perfect India.

But because I wish humanity had been allowed to keep everything it once knew.

Because when knowledge is destroyed, we don’t just lose the past.

We lose all the futures that knowledge might have created.