What ragging at BHU and gatekeeping in the WordPress community taught me about human nature, jealousy, and why your work always speaks louder than any group.
I want to share something today that I have never written about publicly. Not because it was traumatic – it really was not. But because it took me years to connect the dots between two very different chapters of my life and see the same ugly pattern of human nature playing out in both.
One happened inside the old brick hostels of Banaras Hindu University. The other happened in the WordPress community – a space that talks endlessly about openness, collaboration, and giving back.
The pattern was the same. The faces were different. And the lesson? It changed how I see people, groups, and this whole idea of respect.
The Day I Said No
When I joined MCA at BHU, I was not a newcomer to the campus. I had already spent three years there completing my B.Sc. (Hons) in Computer Science. I knew the campus like the back of my hand. The libraries, the canteen shortcuts, the professors and their quirks, the admin office staff who actually got things done – I had spent three years building those connections organically, not for any strategic reason, but simply because that is what happens when you live somewhere long enough.
So when I walked into the MCA department as a first-year student, I was technically a junior. But I did not feel like one. I had my own comfort zone, my own routine, my own circle that existed outside the MCA department entirely.
Within the first few weeks, some second-year and third-year MCA students started what they called “interaction sessions.” We all know what that means. It was ragging, dressed up in polite language. They wanted the usual – stand up, introduce yourself, do something embarrassing, show that you accept your place in the hierarchy.
I politely refused.
I did not make a scene. I did not go to the anti-ragging committee. I did not threaten anyone. I simply said no. Politely but clearly.
That is when things got interesting.
The Threat That Made Me Smile
When I refused, the seniors had a standard script ready. You have probably heard it before if you have been through Indian college hostels.
“You will not get any help from us.”
“No one will share notes with you.”
“Campus placements? Forget about getting any guidance.”
“You are on your own.”
They said it like it was supposed to scare me. Like being cut off from their group was the worst thing that could happen to a first-year MCA student.
I remember my response clearly because it came from a very honest place. I told them – look, you are new to this campus. You have spent one or two years here. I have already spent three years during my B.Sc. I know more people on this campus than you do. I know teachers across departments. I know the system. If anything, if you guys need any help navigating this campus, let me know.
I was not being arrogant. I was stating a fact. And the fact made them uncomfortable because it broke the power dynamic they were trying to establish.
That was also a reason I was never too focused on getting connected to everyone in the MCA batch specifically. I already had my world on that campus. I did not need to prove myself to a new set of people who thought seniority automatically meant authority.
And honestly, even beyond the BHU situation – I have never been the kind of person who focuses on talking to lots of people. I would rather spend that time working, talking to a client about a real problem, or doing research that actually moves things forward. Networking for the sake of networking has always felt hollow to me. I would rather have three real conversations about actual work than thirty surface-level “let us connect” interactions that go nowhere.
Three Years of Silence
What followed was a clean, quiet, three-year boycott.
No drama. No confrontation. No shouting matches in the corridor. Just silence.
My batch mates – the ones who had gone along with the seniors – were told not to talk to me. Group projects became awkward because team members who were assigned to work with me would avoid eye contact, avoid conversations, avoid anything beyond the absolute minimum.
Here is the part that sounds strange but is completely true – I did not even know all of their names. Not because I was making some kind of statement. I genuinely did not pay enough attention to the social politics of the department to memorize who was who in the various groups and subgroups.
I was focused on my studies. I was working on my own projects. I had friends from my B.Sc. days. I had a life outside the MCA department. The boycott was something that was happening around me, not to me.
And honestly? I was happy.
The Thing About Forced Respect
Let me say something that might sound controversial in a culture that places so much weight on respecting your elders and seniors.
You cannot force someone to give respect. And you definitely cannot force someone to accept disrespect and call it respect.
What those seniors wanted was not respect. They wanted submission. They wanted me to perform a ritual that established their dominance and my subordination. That is not respect. That is a power game.
Real respect is earned. It comes from watching someone work hard, seeing them help without being asked, noticing them show up consistently over months and years. You cannot shortcut that by making someone stand in a corridor and answer embarrassing questions.
The good thing – and I genuinely mean this without sarcasm – is that there was no real grudge from their side beyond the boycott. They did not try to sabotage my academics. They did not block me from opportunities. They did not go to professors and bad-mouth me. They simply pretended I did not exist. And I was okay with that arrangement.
No hard feelings. Then or now.
And I genuinely mean that. I have never been someone who keeps grudges. It is a destructive habit. Grudges eat your time, your energy, your focus. All the hours you spend replaying an old insult in your head – those are hours you could have spent building something. I have always preferred to let things go and move forward. Life is too short and too interesting to spend it keeping score.
The Fun Part: Know Your Critics
Now here is something I will admit that might surprise you.
I actually enjoy poking people who hold grudges against me.
Not in a mean way. Not to start fights. But there is a quiet entertainment in watching someone who has decided to dislike you squirm when you show up being cheerful, successful, and completely unbothered by their opinion. It is like a small social experiment. You smile, you are polite, you ask how they are doing – and you can see the internal conflict on their face. They want to dislike you but you are being so normal that they have nothing to react to.
It is genuinely fun. I recommend it.
But more importantly, there is a practical wisdom in knowing exactly who does not like you. Think about it this way – in life, you will always have three kinds of people around you. People who are positive toward you, people who are neutral, and people who are negative.
The positive ones are obvious. They help, they support, they show up.
The neutral ones are fine. They do not help, but they do not hurt either. Zero impact.
The negative ones – the ones who hold grudges, who wish you would fail, who would actively work against your interests if given the chance – those are the ones you need to identify.
And here is the thing most people get wrong: a person who is zero to you is better than a person who is negative. A stranger who does not know you and does not care about you is a safer presence in your life than someone who smiles at you while privately hoping you fail.
Knowing who is negative is valuable intelligence. It is not about being paranoid. It is about being aware. An unknown person who is neutral cannot hurt you. But a known person who carries a grudge and hides it behind politeness – that person can do damage when you are not looking.
So I have learned to pay attention. Not with anxiety, but with amusement. Know who your critics are. It is not a burden – it is a superpower.
Fast Forward: The WordPress Community
Years later, I found myself building a career around WordPress. And I loved it. The open-source philosophy, the idea that anyone can contribute, the global community that supposedly welcomed everyone – it felt like the right place to be.
But as I went deeper, I started seeing a pattern that felt uncomfortably familiar.
There are people in the WordPress community – specifically in the Indian WordPress ecosystem – who have positioned themselves as leaders. Not because they built something extraordinary. Not because they contributed game-changing code to core. Not because they helped hundreds of developers grow.
They became leaders because they were doing “something something.” Organizing a meetup here. Giving a talk there. Being visible. Being loud. Being in the right WhatsApp group at the right time. I have written before about how contributor days often prioritize badges over meaningful impact – and that same surface-level approach extends to community leadership.
And somehow, over time, they started behaving as if everything WordPress in India needs to flow through them. Like they are the gatekeepers. Like they get to decide who is doing good work and who is not. Who deserves recognition and who should be ignored.
It felt exactly like those MCA seniors. Different setting. Same energy.
The Sabotage Problem
Here is where it gets worse than the BHU experience.
At BHU, the seniors simply boycotted me. They left me alone. That was manageable.
In the WordPress community, the dynamic is more active. It is not just about exclusion – it is about sabotage.
When someone is doing good work, building products, helping clients, growing a business – and they are doing it without being part of the inner circle, without attending the right dinners, without praising the right people – the response is not just silence.
The response is active undermining. Whispering campaigns. Subtle discouragement. “Oh, that person? I have heard things.” Questions about credibility, planted without evidence. Efforts to make sure that person does not get invited to speak, does not get featured, does not get the partnership.
Not because the person did anything wrong. But because the person succeeded without asking permission from the self-appointed gatekeepers. And nothing threatens a gatekeeper more than someone who found another door.
The Sheep Mentality
The part that I find most fascinating – and most disappointing – is the followers.
Every self-appointed leader has a group of people around them who nod along to everything. “Yes, you are right.” “Absolutely.” “I completely agree.” They validate every opinion, support every exclusion, amplify every whisper.
And here is the remarkable thing – most of these followers have never met the person they are agreeing to dislike. They have never worked with them. They have never had a conversation with them. They have never seen their code, their products, their client work.
They are simply following. Because following is easy. Because being part of a group feels safe. Because agreeing with the loudest voice in the room requires zero effort and zero independent thinking.
I see this everywhere. Not just in WordPress. Not just in tech. It is a fundamental human pattern. We are wired to form tribes, and tribes need an “other” – someone to exclude, someone to define the group against.
But understanding the psychology does not make it less frustrating when you are the one being “othered” for no reason beyond existing outside someone’s circle.
Jealousy Is a Strange Monster
Let me talk about something that most people will not say out loud because it sounds bitter. But I am not bitter. I am observing.
Most people are more disturbed by someone else’s growth than they are motivated by their own.
Read that again.
When you are doing well – when your products are getting traction, when your clients are happy, when your revenue is growing, when people in the community start noticing your work – the reaction from certain people is not “good for them.” The reaction is “why them and not me?”
And instead of using that feeling as fuel to work harder on their own growth, they channel it into pulling others down. It is easier to undermine someone else’s success than to build your own. It takes less effort. It requires no skill. And it gives an immediate sense of power.
This is not a WordPress problem. This is a human nature problem. I saw it at BHU in 2006. I see it in the WordPress community in 2026. I am sure people saw it in village councils a thousand years ago. The medium changes. The pattern does not.
What No One Can Take From You
Here is the part I love most.
Your work speaks. It speaks louder than any WhatsApp group, any meetup clique, any self-appointed leader.
There is a beautiful thing that happens when you just keep working. When you keep building. When you keep shipping products. When you keep helping clients. When you keep contributing code. When you keep showing up.
People notice.
Not the gatekeepers. Not the self-appointed leaders. But the people who actually matter – the developers who use your plugins, the clients whose businesses run on your solutions, the people who google a problem at 2 AM and find your blog post that solves it.
Here is what has happened to me consistently, in both settings. People I have never met know my name. They have seen my work. They have used something I built. And when we finally meet, they say, “Oh, I know you. I have been using your work for years.” I shared some of that journey – from writing PHP in a college cybercafe to serving clients across continents – and every milestone in that story came from work, not from being in anyone’s inner circle.
That feeling – that moment of recognition based purely on the quality of your output – is worth more than any seat at any insider table.
The Counter-Intuitive Gift of Being Boycotted
Looking back at those three years at BHU, I realize something that sounds strange.
Being boycotted was a gift.
It forced me to be self-reliant. It eliminated the noise of social obligations. It gave me three years of focused, uninterrupted study time. While others were busy navigating the social dynamics of who is in and who is out, I was reading, coding, learning, building.
The same thing happened in the WordPress space. When certain groups decided I was not part of their circle, it freed me. I did not have to attend the right events. I did not have to praise the right people. I did not have to play politics. I could just work.
And work compounds. Day after day, month after month, year after year – consistent work creates results that no amount of social positioning can match.
What I Want You to Take Away
If you are reading this and you have been through something similar – at a university, in a workplace, in a community – I want you to know a few things.
First, it is not about you. Their behavior says everything about them and nothing about you. The boycott, the exclusion, the whisper campaigns – these are reflections of their insecurity, not your inadequacy.
Second, do not waste energy fighting it. I have seen people destroy their own peace trying to be accepted by groups that were never going to accept them. The entry ticket to these groups is your dignity. It is not worth paying.
Third, focus on the work. I know it sounds like a cliche. But cliches become cliches because they are true. Your code does not care about social politics. Your clients do not care who you eat lunch with. Your products do not care whether a self-appointed leader approves of you.
Fourth, time is honest. Over a long enough timeline, the truth about everyone comes out. The people who were all noise and no substance eventually get exposed. The people who were quietly building eventually get recognized. Not always fairly. Not always quickly. But eventually.
Fifth, keep your heart clean but your eyes open. I have zero grudge against those seniors at BHU. I have zero grudge against the WordPress gatekeepers. Carrying bitterness is like holding a hot coal – it only burns the person holding it. But not carrying a grudge does not mean being naive. Know who is in which category. A neutral stranger is better than a negative acquaintance. Zero is always better than minus.
The Best Part
You know what the best part is about all of this?
Every person, at the end of the day, has only two things that are truly theirs – their effort and their work. Everything else is temporary. Groups dissolve. Leaders fade. Circles break. The WhatsApp group goes quiet. The meetup clique moves on to the next trend.
But if you have spent your time building, creating, solving problems, helping people – that stays. That is your foundation. No one can boycott your skills. No one can gatekeep your knowledge. No one can sabotage your consistency.
Sometimes other people can help, and that is wonderful when it happens. But help is a bonus, not a dependency. Your growth, your success, your reputation – these are built brick by brick with your own hands.
I learned this at twenty-one in a BHU hostel. I relearned it at thirty-five in the WordPress community. And I will probably relearn it again somewhere else because human nature does not change.
But the lesson stays the same.
Keep your head down. Do the work. Let the work speak.
Everything else is noise.
This post is not about naming names or settling scores. It is about a pattern I have observed across twenty years, two very different worlds, and hundreds of interactions. If you see yourself in the “boycotter” role – no judgement. We all have moments of weakness. But maybe today is a good day to ask yourself: am I building something, or am I just blocking someone?
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