Wonderful write up by Dr.HarshVardhan.

[CS Chandramouli]

Stop Blaming the Wrong Brahmin

Most of my childhood was spent in a Brahmin colony and no, we weren’t Brahmins.
We were the only non-Brahmins there. The only nonvegetarians.
And let me tell you something uncomfortable: not once not once did I face casteism.

We played cricket together.
Shared tiffin boxes and ate in each others homes. They came to our functions. We sat on their floors.

But what struck me even then, as a boy was their poverty.Not poverty of culture that they had in abundance.But of resources, opportunity, money.

Their houses were modest, often crumbling.
Their parents were temple priests, schoolteachers, typists, purohits.
Most of my childhood friends never became doctors or engineers.
Not because they weren’t bright but because there were no seats left for them.

They were crushed between history and modernity between ritual visibility and economic irrelevance.

I saw Brahmins fade quietly into the lower middle class, holding on to dignity while the nation rewrote its villains.

Today, I walk past the Rayara Mata temple I once played outside
and it’s a shadow of what it was.
Not because faith died,
but because the people who once preserved knowledge without asking for anything in return were systematically forgotten.

Now scroll your social media today, and you’ll see posts blaming them for everything:
India’s poverty. Casteism. Inequality. Lack of innovation.

Really?

A 3% community — with no armies, no banks, no land — became your villain?
A class of people who survived by reading, fasting, and copying manuscripts in dim light are now the ones holding India back?

India was rich when Brahmins were valued during the Guptas, the Cholas, Vijayanagara.
India collapsed under Mughals, the British, and feudal leeches who drained this land while burning every library and banishing every teacher.

You want to talk about caste? Good. Let’s do it.

But caste didn’t survive because of Brahmins.
Caste calcified when the nation collapsed.
When GDP vanished, when hope died, when invaders turned occupation into identity.

People held onto whatever they could — just to survive.

Don’t call that oppression.
Call it trauma.

And now you want to cancel the one community that kept our stories, songs, rituals, calendars, and civilizational memory alive?

Who fed temples with nothing but faith and rice water?

You’re not decolonizing. You’re just outsourcing rage to the only group too dignified to fight back.

I owe it to those friends — from that Brahmin colony —
who never made it to IIT, AIIMS, or politics,
but made sure I had a childhood of harmony, simplicity, and reverence.

This post is for them.
This post is for Rayara Mata.
This post is for truth.

Stop blaming the wrong Brahmin.
Start fixing the real power structures.