Personal Development | On My Canvas

3 Secrets of a Happy Relationship I’m Learning the Hard Way

painting of a couple in countryside Hans_Brasen_-_Passiaren_Fortsættes_feature-image for secrets of a happy relationship article.png

How to be Happy in a Relationship: My 3 Learnings

Vincent_van_Gogh Self-Portrait for vincent van gogh letter to theo on courage-perseverance-artists-life small.jpeg

Letters From Van Gogh The celebrated painter Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) regularly wrote to his brother Theo, his ardent supporter and friend. Out of the hundreds of letters by Vincent van Gogh, the Vincent van Gogh organization has put about hundred on their website. The book Ever Yours: The Essential Letters contains a broad selection of …

the author standing on a hill in himachal pradesh looking at the view to show we are tiny in the spectrum of things 2.jpg

Reflecting on 2021 and Heading into 2022 with Mindfulness, Confidence, and Non-Reaction to External The Year 2021 I cannot believe 2021 is over. We were recently cheering the end of 2020: the year that marked sickness, unprecedented loss, heart-choking grief, unemployment, loneliness, and lives put on hold. I feel we had just closed our eyes, …

A Letter to My Younger Self

I know you like them words. But an introduction doesn’t work everywhere so let me get to the point.

a man standing on a mountain a scene in hard himalayan village life in india to show resilience

Village Life of India : An Old Himalayan Woman’s Life at a Glance. Notes From Gagal Village, Mashobra, Shimla

I woke up at 5. The host’s kitchen hut was filled with yellow light from the bulb. Smoke rose out of the hut’s chimney. Our homestay’s mother, whom we called Aunty, was already up.

Aunty must’ve folded the mat on which she slept on the kitchen floor, had lit firewood in the chulha, and must’ve been preparing milky tea then (a common scene in village life of India). Though I never entered the kitchen —when I had asked Aunty if I could make chapatis on her chulha, she had said women couldn’t enter there — from outside I had seen her fluff chapatis on the woodfire and paste the floor with yet another fresh layer of mud and cow dung. Aunty was somewhere between 60 and 70.

(I don’t have any pictures of Aunty neither would I want to post them online. So please bear with me while I add photos of everything else around her home.)

in chile in cauquenes with friends teaching english in chile

Covid-Related Travel Update, Jan 2024: Chile is open to international tourists. Visit the Chilean government’s official website for travel-related information and regulations. Don’t forget to read the government’s rules to be followed in public spaces here. My guide to Chile visa would be helpful for Indian citizens.

It is Diwali and I’m reminded of a Diwali I spent with three crazy Chilean sisters in a country home of Chile five years ago. Damn! It has been five years. The narrative tells just how different two cultures can be.

In 2016, I had been volunteering as an English teacher with the English Open Doors program in Chile. I was in the south of Chile on the Chiloé island in its capital city Castro. Like other volunteers I stayed in a Chilean home. The house had my bubbly host mother, other Chilean borders, and two more volunteers from England and the US.

It was Diwali and also an extended weekend in Chile. My host mother was visiting her relatives. Other housemates were traveling.

I had made many friends by then but Gabriela, another English teacher on the island, had become a special one. She invited me to a countryside family get-together with her two elder sisters. They were going to their parental home in Cauquenes, a small town in Southern Chile, to celebrate Gabby’s daughter Javiera’s eighteenth birthday.

Either I could’ve gone with Gabriela or traveled with an English volunteer best friend and housemate (and his other friends) to another cool place. (This things to do in Chile travel blog from my experiences will help you plan your trip.)

But spending Diwali with three crazy Chilean sisters sounded much more fun than talking about foreign things with other foreign travelers. So I packed my bags, took a bus to Gabby’s house, and together we took another bus to Cauquenes.

1024px-Gustave_Caillebotte,_1881_-_Chemin_montant (1) (1) a man and a woman walking apart from each other in a garden

Getting dumped isn’t the end of the world.

The silver line of a breakup (first only faintly visible) is we get to feel and smoothen out the rough curves of our personalities.

In this essay I talk about my first love and my first break up. Though that first love seemed like my last, time proved me wrong. That love couldn’t be my last for I am still learning the secrets of a happy relationship. Looking back into the broken shards of the relationship, I also see how scattered a human being I was.

Best Articles Published During On My Canvas’s Fourth Year (August 2020 — August 2021) My blog On My Canvas just turned four. Congratulations to me and to all you brilliant readers who give me a reason to write every day. Read the above link to know about the indefinite travel journey I’m on, another big news, …

walking on mountains in gagal near mashobra shimla himachal four years of blog celebration.jpeg

Celebrating Four Years of On My Canvas – Learnings and Updates

Phew!

It has been four years since I published the first article on On My Canvas. From then on, these four years have been a non-stop roller-coaster ride. From the first year of impenetrable determination but absolute ignorance to helping out other bloggers from my two years of blogging journey, and the third year of accomplishments, I’ve come a long way.

The journey started with writing. But every artist needs an audience. I want to thank you all — my beloved readers — who have helped me make the blog the meaningful resource it is. Though I know On My Canvas has to reach a lot more people, I really appreciate the love and support I’ve received so far. At least, I have not been hit by spoiled tomatoes or stinky eggs.

So thank you!

Purposeful, Healthy, and Mindful Living

I had planned to share lessons from the book “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life” and experiences from practicing a sustainable and conscious lifestyle in this piece. But as I wrote, I also added health concepts I had learned (and practiced) growing up in India, lifestyles I had studied from books, and ways of living I had seen while traveling.

So now this article is a conglomeration of the most logical, useful, and effective ideas — that I’ve found — on living a healthy, simple, and, yet, purpose-driven life.

What is the main method that we will follow to live this amazing, mindful life?

boy getting knowledge from nonfiction books cosmic energy

Out of the 48 or so books I read in 2020, 25 percent—that’s only 12 books—were non-fiction. The rest were fiction books and children’s tales.

I started reading non-fiction in 2017 when I started this blog On My Canvas. I always read stories and novels, but nonfiction wasn’t a big thing around me. Not that reading fiction was a trend in my social circle either. I can count the selected few readers amongst my friends, batch mates, and colleagues at my fingertips.

There was one guy in college who loved Shakespeare and read philosophy. There is a poetry lover and creator who is still a great friend. Some of the elites from Vidya Mandir and other high-class Delhi schools could talk about Mark Twain and J.R.R Tolkien but only seldom did I see them with a book. Or maybe I wasn’t noticing books at that time myself.

best fiction books i read in 2020 cover photo

I write because I read. I grow because I read. I can never be bored because I read.

Out of the 48 or so books I read in 2020, 75 percent — that is 36 books — were fiction. The rest were non-fiction books, children’s stories, and travel books.

Even though most of my writing is personal growth and travel-focused, I also write short stories and personal essays.

And for any kind of creative writing — travel, short stories, and even self-development — reading fictional books is crucial. Otherwise, how would I know how to describe a scene on the street or a conversation amongst two people sitting in a cafe? How would I keep the articles interesting and give them a story arc? A beginning, a middle, and an end, you know.

Apart from helping me write, fiction short story books and novellas are interesting and entertaining. They teach a lot about the history of the world. Fiction books also unravel the behavior and inner workings of human beings. (Here are 21 books that changed my life.)

So while The Outsider taught me how straightforward life can be, Gora and Anna Karenina showed me a lot about the desires and limitations of human beings while telling the history of India and Russia. I wouldn’t have known so much about the Brahmo Samaj and the Russian high class if not for those two books.

Here are the creative fiction books I loved the most in 2020, that helped me understand something better, moved my life ahead, or made me feel as if with the characters I had progressed, too.