We are a civilisation that is several millennia old! One out of every seven persons on the planet is Bharatiya. We are a flourishing society, with so many languages, diverse customs, countless festivals, a multitude of symbols, myriad art forms, innumerable cuisines, infinite costumes and manifestations of our deities that is only limited by our imagination.

However, in modern-day chatrooms and across social media platforms, the diversity, variety & richness of our way of life is not adequately represented. Once it is not represented in our everyday discourse, it slowly fades away from our collective memory. Desi Emojis is an App that seeks to correct that!

There is an emoji for every reason and every season!

Unless you’re Indian!

But not anymore!

We are changing that by building an App that offers you a range of emojis, unique to India, created by Indians & for use by the world. You have a unique opportunity to be a part of this movement to bring Bharatiyata to our conversations, through emojis. We are raising this money to create the App for Android initially & then iOS, to market it, create awareness & encourage usage of Desi Emojis.

We are crowdsourcing the emoji candidates from Graphic Designers, visit our website https://www.thethanjaibigart.org/ to know more.

We are crowdfunding the cost of creating the App & you have the unique opportunity to be a part of this effort! The App will consist of emoji candidates, the process of getting them accepted as emojis by Unicode Consortium will be commenced once the App is launched. Given that only a few candidates get selected every year, based on rigourous scrutiny, the App will serve as a platform, making Indic, Dharmic, desi & Bharatiya icons available as emoji candidates, till they get accepted as emojis. FYI, emoji are encoded as characters, while the emoji candidates will be PNG files. While there is a legal & technical difference between an emoji & emoji candidate, for the Users of our App, we will endeavour to ensure there will be no discernible difference in the User Experience.

The creation of the App is the first of three hurdles we need to overcome. The second hurdle is the widespread use of these images. Given the underrepresentation of Indic, Dharmic, desi & Bharatiya imagery in the online narrative, this can be easily tackled. The third, toughest & most time-consuming hurdle is to get the emojis to be accepted in character form and be a part of the native OS in various devices. This process is time-consuming, subject to stringent evaluation, with extensive documentation. Some images, such as deities, trademarks, specific landmarks will forever remain as emoji candidates and may be used extensively as emoji candidates, while others, such as in food, sports and art categories, would be eligible for conversion to emojis.

With your support, we would like to take up this Challenge!