Why we must talk about caste

Every few months (years?), Brown Pundits goes through its own small earthquake. A post lands wrong, a comment thread ignites, and the whole Commentariat erupts.

The latest rupture began with a mild jibe on caste. I pointed out, in passing, that caste shapes political instincts far more than many admit. The backlash was instant. A section of the readers declared a quiet boycott. The threads went cold. No one wanted to break ranks. The more one claims to have transcended caste, the clearer its caste blind-spots become. Silence itself becomes a shibboleth.

And when the silence hit, the blog froze.

Then our most controversial voices stepped back in and broke the deadlock. They engage hard. They provoke. They pull the threads back to life. They are often wrong, sometimes reckless, and always loud. But without them, the comment board turns to dust. Whatever one thinks of them, they provide something rare: momentum.

This is the truth no one likes to say aloud. A high-traffic blog cannot survive on lofty essays and polite applause. It needs friction. It needs characters who keep turning the wheel. When the Saffroniate declared its hartal, it was two who snapped the boycott simply by refusing to leave the field.

Behind the scenes, the admin load has become heavy. Authors must be nudged. Comments must be watched. Threads must be steered without killing the buzz. A blog lives by a thin line: too much noise and readers leave; too much silence and the place dies.

The demands of work, family, and life mean I cannot run the place at full throttle every day. I cannot turn each fire into signal. And I cannot clean every mess without killing the energy that keeps this odd machine alive. I manage what I can. I intervene when needed. But I have learned that BP survives best when the system is left to hum on its own.

We all want integrity. We all want good posts, strong ideas, fair argument. But integrity means little if no one shows up to argue. BP is almost fifteen years old to the month. It has outlived trends, platforms, and entire social media cycles. It is one of the last spaces where Indians, Pakistanis, Sri Lankans and the diaspora still meet without filters. That alone is worth safeguarding.

The behind-the-scenes truth is simple:

• Controversial writers keep the wheels turning.

• Silence kills a blog faster than bad opinions.

• Shibboleths reveal more than they hide.

• And BP works best when its messiness is allowed to breathe.

We won’t get everything right. People will overreach. Posts will misfire. Tempers will flare. But the alternative is not peace. The alternative is a dead website. For now, the boycott has broken. The Commentariat is awake. The threads move again. And the old engine keeps running, noisy as ever. As long as it runs, there is life.

In the end, the hartal only proved why the conversation is necessary. Caste is not a peripheral issue in South Asia; it is the deep grammar of politics, culture, aspiration, resentment, and identity. To avoid it is to lie to ourselves. Brown Pundits was never meant to be an echo chamber of polite evasions or curated comfort. It exists so that the diaspora can confront the structures that shape it, even when those structures are invisible to those who benefit from them. If the topic triggers silence, then it has touched something real. And if it breaks the surface of our comment threads, then it is doing exactly what a living forum must do: force us to see ourselves clearly before we speak about the world.