For the last fifteen years, I’ve been a writer — of various things. Here’s a rather short summary of my life’s work.
After a masters in film studies and a
couple of years pretending to study in the UK, I came back and tried
my hand at a number of things — PR, branding, digital marketing and an
NGO for good measure. Nothing lasted, leaving me feeling quite
off-path.
After stumbling on many failures, I fell on my face
into freelancing. I wrote about whatever would pay — a local heritage
walk company, a wealth management consultancy, Ayurveda centre and the
like. Until one afternoon of binging on Hitchcock, Cognizant came
along and gave me the gig to repurpose dense whitepapers into snappy
short-form for their mobile/tablet app.
That struck a chord. I
found tech-writing challenging, inspiring and oddly well-paying. Most
importantly, I found myself having an instinct for the tech business.
I grabbed that hard and have since built Emdash deliberately, as a B2B
tech content practice.
Over the last decade, I’ve had the
chance to work with the who’s who of enterprise tech — Cognizant,
Infosys, Thoughtworks, and some interesting startups such as
Springboard, Spendflo, Facilio, Firework and so on.
I’ve
written about some peculiarly high-tech stuff — reconfigurable
computing, predicting star formation with deep learning, Kubernetes
orchestration (LOL!) and scalable data architectures. On the business
side, I’ve had the chance to write category defining buyer’s guides,
industry reports and award nominations. You can read some of my work
under portfolio.
Even
as we did some high-tech, demanding work, we were the team you could
call in crisis. We always had a little more than content to offer.
I’ve had a client call me frantically on a Saturday morning because he
changed the settings on a WordPress plugin that crashed his site — the
persistent WordPress-er in me had answers. I once taught a
highly-acclaimed Scala programmer that he can copy-paste HTML into the
Outlook email composer and it’ll work! I edited the college
application essays of a client’s son.
Running my own business
gave me the freedom to live as I please. So, I do a bunch of other
things on the side.
At Emdash, I’m the lead (and often only)
writer. I write most of the content we ship and personally review all
of them. As most business owners tend to do, I also edit, design,
reconcile accounts, handle crises and endlessly worry about
profitability. :)
On the side, I’m a film critic and infrequent
essayist. I’ve bylines in a number of publications — portfolio here.
On another
side, I write about modern work, productivity and writing as a
profession. I also do resume reviews/career prep for young
professionals. I did regular workshops for the fellows at Terra.do. More deets here.
Out of
sheer love for the team and the endeavour, I collaborate with the
Bangalore Literature Festival every year. Emdash managed their social
media for years — this year, I was a speaker and a jury member for
ScreenLit.
Any of this finds your fancy? Write to me at
ranjani@emdash.in. Let’s talk. :)
Just want to know more? Find
me on LinkedIn and Twitter.