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All the ideas and brainstorming in the world can’t help you if you don’t take action and do something about them. In any process of creation your greatest enemy is always procrastination. If you ever wish to be someone who actually achieves something, rather than one of the many who had all the best ideas, your greatest skill will need to be fighting your own procrastinating mind.

It’s a tough battle, but somebody has got to do it. Since it’s your mind that’s creating all the trouble, you’re volunteered for this skirmish whether you like it or not. Procrastination, writers block, all sorts of other creative blocks, and just plain laziness, they all happen so regularly because, face it, you’re brilliant. You’re so brilliant, that your brain comes up with these perfect and logical excuses for not doing things all the time and you just can’t argue with brilliant and flawless logic.

Be thankful that the world and human life, doesn’t actually function on logic. No sir it doesn’t. Look at a newspaper, any newspaper, and you will see hundreds of examples of brute force winning out over logic, so would it be so wrong to channel some of this barbaric brute force in a positive manner for once and use it to fight all that flawless logic that’s holding you back from world domination? I think not. So here are some fights you need to pick to get going and do wonders:

1. Fight mental inertia
2. Fight the fear of large tasks
3. Fight the clock
4. Fight the infinite research syndrome
5. Fight distractions
6. Fight the finishing fluster
7. Fight fatigue

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Always being up to a million different things is one of the perils of being me. An unfortunate side-effect is that some things tend to be neglected for a while, like this blog. One of the reasons is that I’ve been trying to research the availability and implementation of free online survey tools for WordPress.

A friend of mine wants to setup a complex survey on her WordPress blog. The idea is to ask some questions on a topic, study the reader response, gather some statistics and arrive at some conclusions — your bog standard survey stuff, really. The challenge and boon of doing an online survey is that a more complex system can be setup to get more out of the process. Ideally, the software tools should be able to gather data, compile statistics, provide some immediate feedback to the participant, and possibly interface with a mailing list or auto-response sequence to allow further contact with the reader. With these lofty goals in mind I set off on my own survey of the available tools.

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Jab We Met (When We Met - Jab is pronounced like ‘cub’ rather than ‘cab’), starring Kareena Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor, is the second film directed by Imtiaz Ali. I was looking forward to this one because I fell in love with the director’s first film, Socha Na Tha, and I was expecting more of the same.

I’ve only ever written about one other Hindi movie in the entire history of this blog, and that write-up wasn’t the most flattering. If you went by that you could be excused for thinking that I wasn’t a fan of Hindi cinema. Nothing could be further from the truth. I am, in fact an ardent fan of Hindi films, but it just so happens that this year has not been a great year. There haven’t been many Hindi movies which I would wholeheartedly recommend since this blog opened shop, and I just wasn’t interested in whining about the rest of them. Now at last we have Jab We Met, and at last there is something I can gush about. That should have been enough to give up the plot of where this is going. I absolutely loved Jab We Met. After a long time, I was happy to see a simple, straight-forward romantic Hindi film done with class, which manages to be both engaging and endearing.

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Another month another milestone here on Samir Bharadwaj dot Com. This monthly report is a bit special because it makes this blog 6-months old. With milestones comes a natural process of looking back and planning forward. In the last six months I have made many mistakes and learnt a lot of new tricks, so it is natural for me to want to make some changes.

Refactoring

I have nothing drastic in mind, but I know of a lot of things that aren’t working well on this site, and many things that could be working better. In the coming months the plan is to do a comprehensive rethinking and refactoring of this site and blog, mainly on a coding and technical level. There are browser compatibility issues to be ironed out and cleaner SEO techniques to be employed. All of these things will make this site better, faster and more effective in the long run.

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