Unicode Consortium adds Hindu temple emoji to its list of emoticons

As social media users in India have been wishing for an emoji for their religion, WhatsApp and Facebook have finally created a temple emoji. Unicode Consortium, the world standard to set emoticons across all platforms has introduced a red-temple emoji in its new release of nearly 60 emojis on October 30. Unicode version 8.0 in 2015 had already added the mosque to its emojis. This year it has also added the temple to Unicode version 12.0. Girish Dalvi from IIT Bombay and Mayaqnk Chaturvedi from Rajya Marathi Vikas Sanstha were reportedly among the first people to propose a Hindu temple emoji on phones back in June 2017. The all-new temple emoji will be available on the latest iOS 13.2 updates. It took two long years for Unicode to finally come up with the emoji yet there were speculations that it could be released since last year. Two other Indian emojis of Saree and Diya have also been added to the new emojis.

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The proposal had stated, "The rationale for the Hindu temple emoji is analogous to the rationales for including the Church, Mosque, and Synagogue emoji, " stated the proposal. 

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Previous criticism by Hindus over the exclusion of temple in emojis

A group of people had earlier expressed their distress over the exclusion of temple emoji on social media. Many on Twitter had said that it was unfair. A user complained saying: "There are millions of Hindus on Whatsapp and you forgot them". Similarly, another had said: "Please help me find Hindu temple emoji". Another went to the extent of accusing Whatsapp of not supporting Hindus.

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