The Chali Machine

Adding Malayalam text to an image in 2014 meant opening Photoshop or Illustrator, and even then Indic rendering in those tools was unreliable. Chali Machine ran in a browser, had Malayalam fonts and a keyboard built in, and came with around 200 hand-drawn characters from Orion, loosely inspired by Bobanum Moliyum. You could pick a character, type in Malayalam, arrange things, and download. No design background needed, no worrying about whether the text would show up correctly.

This was around the time mobile usage and meme culture were picking up across India, and the tool fit that moment in a way we hadn’t entirely planned for. People used it to make comics, graphics, and jokes. It stayed active for a few years after we stopped building it. We later heard from people who were still relying on it, including teachers who needed a straightforward way to create Indic language content and hadn’t found anything else that worked as well.