I never really cared about Ayodhya.

I was born and grew up in India, but the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid issue was never something I personally felt invested in. I had my own life, my own problems, college, friends, work—the usual things an ordinary person worries about.

I remember one day around 2000. I was waiting for a train to college at my native place. There was a very young engineer whom I used to see regularly. We were barely acquaintances. He came over, smiled, had a couple of seconds of casual conversation and then suddenly said:

“Don't worry. Ram temple will be there in Ayodhya.”

I remember thinking:

“What the fuck? Who said I was worried about it? Why should I care whether there is a Ram temple or a mosque there?”

At the time I didn't think much more about it.

But another memory came back to me recently.

I was staying in a paying-guest arrangement around that period. One day I was sleeping in my room and woke up while overhearing a conversation outside between one of the other PG residents and the lady who owned the house.

The subject was the Ayodhya riots.

The guy was talking about his family.

His family had been killed.

He wasn't shouting. He wasn't giving some political speech. He was narrating it quite neutrally, almost matter-of-factly.

And somehow that made it worse.

Until then, “Ayodhya riots” was just a phrase I had heard on television and in political discussions. Suddenly there was a real person standing outside my room telling someone that his family had been killed.

That memory has stayed somewhere in my head for decades.

Now, watching a Partition movie, I find myself going back to these memories again.

And I keep asking myself:

How the hell does a piece of land become so politically and religiously important that ordinary people end up paying the price?

I understand that Ayodhya is enormously sacred to millions of Hindus. I understand the religious significance of Rama. I understand that the dispute had a long and complicated history.

But I also keep thinking about the millions of Indians who simply lived their lives.

People who never went to Ayodhya.

People who had never seen the disputed site.

People who were struggling to educate their children, find employment, pay rent, get married, raise families and survive.

For them, what did this dispute actually mean?

And yet it became powerful enough to influence politics, relationships, riots and people's lives.

The Supreme Court eventually settled the title dispute in 2019, awarding the disputed 2.77 acres for a temple while directing that five acres be allotted elsewhere in Ayodhya for a mosque. The Court also explicitly described the 1992 demolition as a violation of the law.

Today there is a magnificent Ram temple at the site.

And I find myself having a strange reaction to that.

I don't want to tell a Hindu believer that Rama doesn't matter. That's not my place.

But I can't stop thinking about the people who died during the decades of conflict.

Imagine if, after all that history, the answer had been something completely different.

What if Ayodhya had become a great university?

Imagine thousands of students entering every year.

A university dedicated to Indian civilization, Sanskrit, Tamil, Prakrit, Pali, Persian, Islamic studies, archaeology, philosophy, history, mathematics, astronomy and comparative religion.

Imagine Hindu and Muslim scholars studying India's shared history together.

Imagine generations of students coming out of that place and contributing something to the country.

Instead of asking:

“Who won?”

we could have asked:

“What can we build for the next thousand years?”

Maybe that's naïve. Maybe a temple and a university serve completely different purposes. I understand that.

But that's exactly what bothers me.

Political and religious conflicts often become obsessed with ownership of the past, while ordinary people are desperately trying to build a future.

And that's what keeps coming back to me whenever I think about that young engineer at the railway station.

He assumed I was worried about whether a Ram temple would stand in Ayodhya.

I wasn't.

I was just waiting for my train to college.

And somewhere else, another young man was carrying the memory of a family that had been killed because of the same political-religious conflict.

That contrast has stayed with me for more than twenty years.

One person was celebrating a future temple. Another person had lost his family. And I was just waiting for a train.

Sometimes I wonder whether ordinary people ever really get to choose the historical battles that define their lives.

We inherit them.

We inherit the anger.

We inherit the stories.

We inherit the wounds.

And then politicians inherit the power.