I had travelled to Bangalore for an important review meeting. When I got to the client’s office, I was politely seated in a hot conference room with an air conditioner heaving to regulate temperature. Vamsee and I were sitting there restless and sweating, in wait for our clients team to join us.
Four men and a woman walked into the room. I’d met two of them before. I knew the other three by their role and they did not know me at all.
After pleasantries and a cup of tea, I projected my writing on the large screen. I explained why I’d written what I had and stayed silent scrolling the page at regular intervals so they could read on their own. Once most of them looked away from the large screen, I invited comments. An awkward pause followed for about 30 seconds before the first piece of feedback hit me.
“We should remove Emdash,” said one of the new acquaintances.
I caught my bearings in a moment, realising they meant to delete the emdash (the punctuation) and not annihilate Emdash (my business). Why, I asked. “It looks like ChatGPT,” he said.
They didn’t know me nor the punctuation before late 2024.
2010
On a pleasantly cold day in December 2010, I was starting my career in social media marketing. My then boss suggested that I use Twitter (the cool place at the time) more frequently for my personal networking to learn how social platforms work. I loved the idea.
As all serious projects must begin, I set out searching for a name for my online persona (much like my boss’s quirky handle, complete with wordplay and a logo). I had a grand vision of it encapsulating everything that I was. So, naively, I looked into myself.
At the time, my life was filled with cynicism and anger at myself for being over-educated and under-prepared to take on the real world. Everything I’d ‘studied’ seemed useless in paying me enough money to sustain an independent life. All that English I was mastering seemed pointless.
I took that anger out on the world by calling myself ‘Tharkuri’ (Tamil for illiterate). I’d rejected my first language (English) and all that useless education, I thought. So pleased with my own sense of irony, I changed all my handles to Tharkuri (with an underscore).
A blog, lots of tweets and Tweetups later, Tharkuri was as much my name as Ranjani, along with Tharks, Tharkoo and so on. Good times!
2014
A few years later, I became unemployed and was considering going solo. Vain as I am, I started by choosing a name, this time for my practice. “Emdash” emerged most attractive.
About my choice, I proudly wrote:
For the uninitiated, Emdash is a punctuation in the English language. 👉 — It’s longer than a hyphen (-) and longer than the n-dash (–). It’s about the width of the letter ‘m’.
It’s beautiful, elegant, most importantly, it smartly subverts the standard rules of punctuation.
It can be used to connect two sentences — it can do the semicolon’s job. Or foreshadow a list of things — as a colon would do, or a bulleted list. Or parenthesise a digression — which shouldn’t happen in taut writing, but often does — in the middle of a sentence.
It fits perfectly well in prose
In poetry too, it deftly goes —
I chose the name because we are (or want to be) a bit like that — stretched in our ambition, elegant in our execution and versatile in our potential.
Since then, Emdash has been my professional identity. Clients and friends of Emdash lovingly send every article, video, meme or TikTok joke about the emdash. Those who’ve never heard of the punctuation would call the company “ee-yemm-dash” or ask for an explanation. Those from publishing would marvel at this young person who knows of the punctuation. ^raises collar and makes humblebrag face^
Emdash — and the emdash — was a flex.
2025
If you’re tuned in to Tamilnadu politics, you’d know that the word tharkuri is an insult, especially aimed at followers of actor Vijay’s political party, TVK. Now, everyone knows the word and associates it with idiocy, no irony left.
In that world, imagine self-identifying as ‘Tharkuri.’ I haven’t been so scared since I self-identified as an AR Rahman fan on Twitter in peak Mafia era. 😛
Today
For this almost-40-year-old already swatting all kinds of existential crisis, this weird new world where the emdash is untouchable and tharkuri is literal feels like a sign of some sort.
What the sign is, I don’t know. Do you?
Leave a Reply