#1: Mission Complete

I feel great after completing one mission on this blog. It was an amazing journey so far. I thought it would be a good idea to record how I feel right now.

I started out with the notion of creating something new each day. And I think I started alright. However, the more I got into it, the more I was not thinking of creating just anything each day, but trying to improvise my designs and make my creations as meaningful as I could make them. In doing so, my 21 days got stretched into almost 2 months. A couple of my creations took more time than I expected, the #21 took me almost two weeks but I learnt a lot.

I had a lot of first times - my first time with felt, glass painting, infographics and coding websites. And as I write this, I already have a few more ideas that I want to try. I will post them as and when I create those but just as a casual update and not a part of my 21 days journey.

The idea was to "be creative" as a habit. To keep thinking creatively about the problems I face on a day to day basis and I believe there is some improvement there. Every time I face some difficulty performing any of my daily tasks I ask myself - "Can I create an effective solution around this problem?". I just have to continue to keep asking this question and keep creating solutions to make myself get better.

I have experienced a huge leap in my quality of creation in this short period and I intend to keep working towards it. You can see the change in the two websites I created during this time.

First website:  http://21daysofnewsomethings.blogspot.com/2014/03/1-2-delayed-website.html
Second website:  http://21daysofnewsomethings.blogspot.com/2014/04/1-18-another-web-design.html

The other most important thing I learnt is to be obsessed about doing what I had planned to do. There were times I would let it go and leave it for "later" and I could not complete my projects on time. Had I planned properly like estimate the time required to complete a project, think about the challenges I would face early on, create required contingencies, I think i would have been able to close this a little earlier.

With these important lessons I am going to start my second mission to form another habit. (In fact I already have. I just did not want to officially begin it before I closed the first one.)

#1: ##21: Indian Polity and Politics

Hello!

This is a moment I have been waiting for the past two weeks. It has indeed been a long time and I have had to really work towards making this happen and here I am.

Folks, I finally completed my "21 days" in a little over 2 months but I completed it.

This infographic is about the way the Indian government is structured, which people are a part of which branch of the union government and what kind of powers do they have (the literal meaning of politics).

I have just covered the union government to keep things simple. Our government is very complex and there are way too many people involved. If I try making it more comprehensive that what it is now, I might just defeat the purpose of creating infographics to keep things simple.

I had very little knowledge of the structure of the government so I had to read up a lot of wikipedia and look for videos to gather some more knowledge.

Then I had to pick and choose the information I want to display and give it a structure.

After that I had to draw up the infographic on paper to see how to place things.

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This took me around 15 days to finish by devoting around 3 hrs a day on average starting from research to publishing this post.

With that, I present to you my last creation for this mission:

Edit: I almost rewrote this blogpost as the first version was written when I was almost half asleep and dead tired but did not want to go to bed without finishing it.

Update on Post 21

Hello everyone.

I have stopped keeping a count of the number of days I miss writing a post. But I want to let you know, the background process of creating something is always... always running. I have been working on an infographic. It is the first one for me so I am doing a bit of research on the subject and the infographic both.

India is having its 16th general election since last month and my general knowledge isn't my asset (actually, I can call it my weakness). So I decided to explore the Indian Government and Indian polity. Yes, polity and not politics! But you might have guessed it, polity is very closely related to politics.

Polity (n): An organized society, such as a nation, having a specific form of government.

Politics (n): the activities associated with the governance of a country or other area, especially the debate or conflict among individuals or parties having or hoping to achieve power.

So Indian polity refers to India as a society having a specific form of government whereas Indian politics, only by the definition, is related to what activities are performed to run the government.

Using a visual form of representation, I intend to explain:
How is the government of India organised?
Which positions have what power?
Whom/what do we actually vote for?

For instance, when a vote is casted during a general election, it is effectively casted for a political party. Usually a leader is selected to becomes the face of that party during an election. But the leader can change after the election results are announced. So you have the power only to choose a party but not the party leader. Since the leader of the winning party assumes the position of the Prime Minister, we have very little control to choose the Prime Minister. What we can choose is the party.

My pursuit is to stick to facts without using names of people or parties to explain the basic structure of Indian polity and government to folks like me without making them fall asleep. I hold it against my civics textbook to this day for making me lose interest in such an important topic!

To explain intricacies I may have to use an animated infographic which seems like a pretty big commitment at this point and will take me days to create given the complex nature of the subject. So, I am going to cover just the overview this time around (which also is taking a lot of time :)).

There were multiple reasons for me to write this post today:
1) This is a challenging work but I do not want to give it up. I hate the subject and I have to put in a lot of effort to study it without falling asleep. (I have started drinking my black coffees again). Writing it down on this blog helps me stay committed.
2) By elaborating my purpose of the infographic, I am making sure I do not lose sight of the purpose of my project or start cutting corners.
3) It has been so long that I wrote something so decided to say hello and tell you what I have been upto!

This would be my last creation for this mission. I will also be writing a report on what impact this has had on me before I move onto my next mission.

Please stay tuned.... There has been a lot of "backstage" activity happening. I have started warming up for my next mission and I can't wait to share. Just waiting for the right time to reveal it...