What Does it Mean to be Blogging for Eight Years?
For eight years, I haven’t woken up a day thinking I had nothing to do. You must have heard of, “Hey, my project is over. We are celebrating. Now onto new things!” I could never say this. I can exclaim these words after publishing every blog post, but I don’t feel like it. My project is understanding and documenting the act of being alive, and it is never over, until it is over.
I also always have more than enough to write because for almost five years my partner, Sagar, and I have been living nomadically in India. We don’t have a home, our stuff is in our car, Scooby, and we have been traveling slowly. In June 2025, we parked Scooby at Sagar’s parents’ home in North India. Now we have been traveling with our backpacks (Here are my best travel resources).
Given life is this continuous stream of places we visit, thoughts I have, and experiences I want to share, writing is an ongoing blossoming, never-ending work, an ever-bubbling urgency, a slow simmer, a process that now runs within me even when I am not writing.
Writing is breathing. Breathing is writing.
What does this craziness mean for On My Canvas?
What changed this magnificent year and the past few years is that I had been writing my first book, a travel memoir. One of the biggest nonfiction publishing houses had reached out to me to write a book after reading my blog. The book, Journeys Beyond and Within…, was published on January 31 2025. For a few years, I was busy writing and editing the book and doing everything to publish it. This year, mainly I have been able to spread the word for the memoir. Talk to everyone I know, and try to talk to everyone I don’t know.
Meanwhile, my blog, my first baby, took a back seat. Happily, I’d say, because I didn’t find it complaining much.
I started writing the book in March’ 2022 in Pondicherry. The first few months were writing but also living, sort of, a regular life. Walking, cooking, cycling, meeting, attending, that kind of routine. This was followed by a month of adventures in Vietnam (I’ve narrated the adventures from Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh city.). Next came six and a half months of solid writing, our time divided between Calcutta, Siliguri, and Gangtok, with a week in the outskirts of the last two cities (I did manage to get lost in the countryside of Sikkim).
Those months were anything but regular. Early to bed and early to rise, I followed a creative routine, with my body in a chair and a pen in my hands, unless I was sleeping. Yes, I wrote the memoir drafts in longhand. I wrote on the blog, too, but my priority was the book.
I have written about writing the first drafts in more detail in the linked article.
From the Northeast, Sagar, and I drove to Himachal Pradesh. We were in Himachal for four months in 2021 and trusted it to provide us with a fine place to kick off our shoes and write and edit. We wandered around the Himalayas for a few weeks, returning to Rewalsar Lake, Mandi, and the Seven Lakes we had visited in 2021. None worked (in the linked newsletter I have described why they didn’t). But then we returned to a quaint village in the mountains, unknown to the travelers and tourists and our home for three weeks on the previous trip (where we plucked apples from trees). Here we put down for five months.
That year, 2023, Himachal Pradesh was on the news all summer and monsoon. We were rain and flood locked (as you can read and see in the linked newsletter from that time). The roads were damaged, highways were shut down, valleys were flooded, villages were washed away, mountains had collapsed, and the rain still beat down on us mercilessly. My heart broke to see the Himalayas falling apart, but I didn’t rise from my seat apart from running to the hall at the sound of a loud thud, the mountains sliding to the ground in front of our guesthouse.
I published a few blog posts. I was experiencing the worst climate changes, the best village life, and the coveted nomadic routine, and it killed me that I couldn’t write about it all. Neither in longform nor in shortform. I had put my phone aside. It was not only on silent mode but also on do not disturb. I didn’t want to get notified of calls and messages. I didn’t log onto social media. I wasn’t sharing my articles on Facebook or Instagram and weren’t scrolling the apps.
Anything apart from the book meant distraction, and I couldn’t afford distraction.
I didn’t want to see who was doing what, and I didn’t see it for years. I was so absent that bloggers, travel writers, and social media friends messaged to check if I was okay. At the end of the day, I was still writing, editing, and reading. Or I was putting up the book chapters for critique. Or critiquing others’ writing to earn points with which I could request them to tear apart my writing. I was also running up the family’s hill to do yoga, steal cucumbers from their fields, or to chat with local women.
Dinner was mostly semolina pudding. I prepared it with fresh cow milk delivered every night by a lanky village school boy. With our two bowls of pudding at whose centre shone the brown jaggery powder, my partner and I lived in our own bubbles in our two rooms in the guesthouse. We had the whole floor to ourselves. The large hall was also the kitchen, dining, his study, host interaction area, baggage storage, washbasin area, and utensil wash area, and it was sufficient. As long as the mother mongoose didn’t get in.
We had everything.
My blog waited quietly. I published only twenty-seven posts in those two years: thirteen in 2022 and fourteen in 2023. We only left that Himalayan village when the manuscript was ready for the publisher. After two years, I visited my parents. I hadn’t wanted to break the flow of writing.
And then I was on the road, wind in my hair, songs on my lips, and nothing to do on my to-do list (telling myself that I will get to my blog in due time). After living in a cave for more than a year, I didn’t even want to brush my teeth. I wanted to have fun.
Sagar and I drove from my parents’ home towards the South, traveling through Jaipur, Ranthambore, Kota, Indore, Bhopal, Satpura, Nasik, and many other places up to Goa. Goa to meet friends who were celebrating Diwali there. Friends who were with me in college, friends who were designing my book cover, and friends with whom I stop counting hours. During a late-night, late-morning four-week beachy rendezvous in Goa, I edited some old articles on the blog. The 2023 year-end saw me receiving a publishing contract from the publishing house, but also saw me rejecting it.
Now we were in the brand new year of 2024. While traveling through Kerala, Karnataka, and Tamil Nadu, I wrote a few articles. I picked up the newsletter again and sent it regularly. (I have written many articles on Kerala. Find them on the blog.)
Those few months passed quickly. Then it was time again.
After the Southern states, I drove two thousand kilometers to my parents’ home. To write, edit, and push out my memoir. For the next five months, I sat on my desk, doing these things in extreme heatwaves, rain, family dramas, and broken computers (the travel writing tips I had noted down for travel writers came handy).
I tried writing on the blog or sending a newsletter every week or fortnight. I had much to say. But every time I did, I was distracted from Journeys, the stories I was trying to tell, and the worlds I was trying to resurrect.
Remembering my travel experiences, how I got heatstroke on my first solo Goa trip in 2014, or how my feet stopped outside the phone booth in the Charles De Gaulle Airport in 2012, wasn’t easy (Full stories in my book). I hissed, cried, and laughed. Many afternoons, I messaged long lost friends or searched their names in my personal inbox. Maybe I got onto Facebook to stalk them. A crush from college with whom I trekked in the Himalayas was now a partner at a multimillion-dollar consultancy. My ex had become a father. Once-my-best-friend was now too busy to reply to my message, or maybe he didn’t care.
No matter how excruciating writing the book was, I didn’t want to, I couldn’t, tear myself away from it. I dove deeper when I thought deeper wasn’t left to go. Van Gogh, Woolf, Tagore, Sarton, Gunn, Lamott, Goldberg, Kings, Proust, and Bukowski had warned me, though (linked my best learnings, articles, and books of the writers).
Deep, deep, deep I went, away from On My Canvas. This canvas overflowed with past stories, but the new ones were itching to be written. As my partner says, do one thing at a time, and you will do it all (more tried and tested way to achieve goals). I focused on one thing. I held onto the pen, chiseling away at the stories I had been writing and wanted to present to everyone in a book (Here are some of my favorite travel books.).
In the week of Sagar’s and my birthday in September (2024), we drove to the Himalayas again, this time to Uttarakhand. For a few months, we hiked, bought, cooked, ate, and I worked with the editor to finish the developmental edit and the copyediting. I also wrote the epilogue, prologue, and introduction of the memoir.
A typical day in the Uttarakhand looked like this: In the morning I trekked, then I drove us to a new destination where every hotel was shut as offseason was upon us; we, somehow, found one hotel and requested them to clean up a cabin for us, no not a room, a cabin, and this negotiation lasted a couple of hours as we implored and followed up with a reluctant staff; we drove to the village market for lunch, later explored the guesthouse, mesmerized by the green oranges glistening on short trees, and toasted ourselves by the bonfire for a few hours; I stayed up all night resolving and replying to my editor’s comment on the manuscript to send it to her by the morning so she would have it at the beginning of her day (She lived close to London).
Another thing I did in Uttarakhand was to make a book trailer. I devoted two entire weeks to it. The video is a 59-second introduction to Journeys beyond and Within… Hope you enjoy it 🙂
Not much was published on the blog in Uttarakhand. And 2025 was the worst, or the best, of all. The book, my second baby, came out, and all I have done is, as I said above, tell everyone I know, and try to tell everyone I don’t know. Amazon optimizations, social media posts, interviews, talks, printing, visiting distributors, running between bookshops, calling hundreds of book stores, book signings, book club conversations, meeting readers, sending signed copies, writing letters and posting the book to libraries and reviewers (book reviews on The Telegraph Online and Sikkim Express), and a hundred thousand tasks have been my everyday.
The best part of the whole process has been hearing from people reading Journeys and reading their kindest messages, emails, and posts. And, to think, I wrote the entire book in transit.
MY FIRST BOOK
Journeys Beyond and Within...
IS HERE!
In my vivid narrative style (that readers love, ahem), I have told my most incredible adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. In the candid book, the scoldings I got from home for not settling down and the fears and obstacles I faced, along with my career experiments, are laid bare. Witty and introspective, the memoir will make you laugh and inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
Sikkim Express: "Simple, free-flowing, but immensely evocative."
The Telegraph Online: "An introspective as well as an adventurous read."
Grab your copy now!
The memoir is available globally. Search for the title on your country's Amazon.
Or, read a chapter first. Claim your completely free First Chapter here.
I have published only two blog posts this year, so far. Three, including this one.
Writing The Exquisite Eccentricities of Eight Years has been hard. Perhaps the flickering guilt in me that I haven’t spent enough time on the blog has handcuffed me. What’s there to write? Yet, not one day has gone by when I thought I have nothing to do, and that counts, and that warrants me to celebrate the eight-year anniversary of On My Canvas, albeit four and a half months late.
Sometimes I feel everything I do is for this blog. All that I see, the stinky streets I wander into, the ferocious ferries I board, the suspicious strangers I talk to, the plethora of photographs I take, the day and night skies I strain my neck for, the bewitching birds I run after, the imploring ink bottles I empty, the empty evenings I stay up reading, the movies I miss, the phone calls I pass up, and the paunchy paychecks I have said goodbye to.
Everything I do, I do for On My Canvas. It is my firstborn, after all.
8 Eccentricities of 8 Years of On My Canvas. Or, should I say, the Eight Eccentric Years of On My Canvas and Me
1. It’s harder than I imagined.
2. I am stronger than I thought.
3. When it becomes harder, it is more fun, and wilder.
4. Life takes its course; it’s nothing like I thought it would be. Instead of being washed away like a stone, I am learning to allow myself to be a leaf, gently being carried further than my imagination could ever take me.
5. I always say I am an itinerant writer, not a digital nomad. Why do I hate the phrase? Because I am hardly digital. On days, I didn’t know if I was connected to the internet. I was writing. Writing with a pen and paper, words that became my first book.
I am not a nomad, not in the traditional sense. Maybe in the modern sense, yes. Traditional nomads lived in the middle of nowhere, traveled constantly, and you couldn’t find them. They might be in the forest, on an island, or up the next mountain range. We live in homes rather than in the true elements of nature. I’d have liked the wilderness more, but in India, we do not have designated camping spots, nor the culture of camping or camper vans. Carrying my home with me is not a safe option.
The term digital nomad is restrictive, putting us within boundaries, boundaries that people will have many ideas about. They will have various definitions of this term. I don’t think we will fit into any of those meanings. While the phrase itinerant writer is liberating, open to interpretation. Or, I simply prefer the word: traveler.
6. When you find yourself alone, don’t fear. Don’t fret, get enraged, or be saddened. Depend on yourself and be your friend. Being kind and loving to yourself is the best gift to give to the lonely you. Friends can be busy. The one we met yesterday on the road is now seven continents away. Even the person next to us can’t be with us in our loneliest times. Remember, you always have you. And nature. And, of course, books.
7. Sometimes I want to use the many pains of life as excuses to not do and not be the best version of me. Look, how far I have come. Do they need to test me more? But have you seen a tree cower down because it is being overshadowed by a bigger one? Or a river stopping to flow because of a boulder in her path? It is in her nature to flow and sing, and in the tree’s nature to grow and seek sunlight and squeeze through every inch and bend in every direction to get what it needs. It is in my nature to do what I do and be the best of me. It is in the nature of all of us, and the nature is the best teacher. No wellness retreat, Ayurvedic healing centers, or therapists can do what an hour in a forest can do.
8. Actions over words.
9. If you don’t believe in yourself, why will they?
10. Live as if no one is watching you. At least when no one is watching you. (Everything I have learned and ideas to excel in your 30s.)
11. Simple things bring the most joy. Instead of spending hours on clothes, shoes, bags, jewelry, decorations, or furniture, I face the sun and devour a persimmon. And I find nothing else more fulfilling. (14 things we can care less about.)
12. Who does what is none of my business.
Further Reading: Seven Scintillating Years of On My Canvas – In this one, I talked about the more practical things, such as if I resent something, am I successful, how do I manage money, and if I would go back and do it again.
Okay, these are twelve eccentricities. Well, what can I do? I have never been able to squeeze anything into a perfect format or niche.
On My Canvas holds many genres of writing. My book has stories of various styles. I couldn’t not experiment. I love chickpea curry rice as much as I love a cheesy spaghetti. I wander in the wild Himalayas, but in the wild Andes too. I quit my computer science job, and now I write. I read fiction and travel and Einstein.
One day I wear a flower-embroidered Indian salwar kameez, and the other night I am putting on a cat night suit. Some guesthouse owners will complain how pedantic I was, while the rest would perhaps cry, missing me (Homestays of India and accommodations of India, my best tips and stays included). I don’t remind the restaurants of an item forgotten in the bill, but I tip, sometimes more than my capacity. I have never been consistent or predictable. I have never been able to squeeze anything into a perfect format, niche, or list.
And I am not going to begin now.
On My Canvas will always be a place to share what I live. Here, I will always note down the words that wouldn’t sit in my stomach. I will always have enough color, or misty breaths, to paint this one, to keep it colorful for you.
Thank you for reading all these years and for being here with me.
What do you enjoy reading most on On My Canvas?
MY FIRST BOOK
Journeys Beyond and Within...
IS HERE!
In my vivid narrative style (that readers love, ahem), I have told my most incredible adventures, including a nine-month solo trip to South America. In the candid book, the scoldings I got from home for not settling down and the fears and obstacles I faced, along with my career experiments, are laid bare. Witty and introspective, the memoir will make you laugh and inspire you to travel, rediscover home, and leap over the boundaries.
Sikkim Express: "Simple, free-flowing, but immensely evocative."
The Telegraph Online: "An introspective as well as an adventurous read."
Grab your copy now!
The memoir is available globally. Search for the title on your country's Amazon.
Or, read a chapter first. Claim your completely free First Chapter here.
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