WOCULT

About a year ago, one of us chose to slow a career down. Not because something was wrong. Not out of necessity. It was a deliberate, considered choice. And it was harder than we have let on.

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes with stepping back while the world keeps moving. You scroll through updates and see peers announcing milestones, promotions, funding rounds, new titles. And something in you quietly asks: am I falling behind? Is this a mistake? Who am I if I am not pushing forward?

The guilt is real. The identity crisis is real. The fear of professional cost bleeding into emotional cost: that is real too.

What made it worth it was Adya.

Not in a sentimental, Instagram-caption kind of way. But in the way that purpose reframes time. When you are in it, a year feels like a lot to give up. When you zoom out, it is a small fraction of a life that has already achieved more than it needed to prove. We are not in a race with a finish line. We are building something with a longer horizon, and that horizon includes a child who feels her parents were present, not just successful.

Still, we will not pretend it was easy. We are figuring it out as we go.

What Presence Looks Like

Between the two of us, Anupma carries more of the daily rhythm of raising Adya. The after-school conversations, the bedtime negotiations, the small moments where a child tells you who she is becoming. Her instinct is more cautious than mine, more protective of the slowness of childhood, less eager to rush Adya toward the future.

My contribution looks different. Weekdays, I try to be the person who starts her morning. I help her wake up, get ready, send her off to school. I come home late most nights, after she is already asleep. But the morning is mine to give. A good day starts somewhere, and I want it to start with her knowing I showed up.

It is a quieter kind of presence. But it is the one we can offer without lying about it.

Raising a Child for a Different World

We grew up in a world that felt more legible. You studied, you built a career, success had a recognisable shape. Linear. Structured. You knew what you were aiming for.

Adya’s world is already different. Careers are no longer fixed. Entire industries are being rewritten. The idea of doing one thing for life already feels like something from a history book.

That excites us. She will have freedoms we never had: to explore, to reinvent, to define success on her own terms.

It also worries us. How do you prepare a child for a future that even the people building it cannot fully see?

Her First Relationship With AI

One evening, I was experimenting at home with a voice AI interface, something I build with professionally. Adya wandered in, curious. She did not ask what it was or how it worked. She just wanted to play with it. Like a toy. Unbothered by its nature, delighted by its responsiveness.

Later, when I asked her what she thought it was, she said: a robot. And when I pressed further, she was certain it had feelings, because that is what robots do in her cartoons and movies.

That conversation told me something important. She already has a relationship with AI, even if she does not have the words for it. And the ideas she is absorbing about what AI is, what it feels, what it wants, are coming from fiction, not reality.

So we are being intentional. I want her to grow up as an AI user, not an AI dependent. There is a difference. A user brings her own thinking to the tool and directs it toward something. A dependent hands the thinking over.

The skill I want her to develop is not how to use AI. She will figure that out the way she figures out every new toy. It is the confidence to know she is the one in the room with actual judgment, actual feeling, actual stakes. That no matter how fluent the machine gets, she is still the point of it all.

I will take it slow. Introduce it gradually, with context. Build her belief in her own intelligence before she starts measuring it against a machine.

What We Hope Education Still Gives Her

When we think about education, we are honest that the current system still feels built for a different era. It will give her the basics: reading, writing, problem solving. Those matter.

But what we find ourselves quietly nurturing at home goes beyond that. Curiosity. The habit of asking why before accepting what. Comfort with not knowing, the ability to sit with uncertainty without panicking to resolve it. Empathy that is not just politeness but genuine attentiveness to other people. And a strong enough sense of self that she does not need the world’s validation to feel steady.

None of these show up on a report card. But they might be the ones that matter most in a world that keeps changing the rules.

Protecting Childhood

There is something else we are protecting, consciously: her childhood itself.

The world is accelerating in ways that can quietly pull children into adult anxieties before they are ready. Faster decisions, faster expectations, the pressure to be optimised even at six.

We try to leave space where she does not have to keep up with anything. Time to play without structure. Time to be bored. Conversations that are not going anywhere. Moments where she is not preparing for the future but simply living inside the present.

Maybe that is its own kind of preparation.

What We Want Her to Learn From Us

There are things we wish someone had told us earlier. That careers are not linear, and that is fine. That a pause is not a fall. That success looks different in different seasons of life. That fulfillment is not always about moving faster. Sometimes it is about knowing what matters and staying close to it.

We are not just telling Adya these things. We are trying to show her, through how we live and the choices we make and how we talk about work and life at the dinner table.

The night she asked her question, we did not give her a fixed answer. We simply said: you will get to choose what your life looks like. It will probably change many times. But whatever you do, we hope you enjoy it, feel proud of it, and still have time for the people and things you love.

She smiled and moved on.

For now, that was enough.

For the World Ahead

We are not raising Adya for the world as it is today. We are raising her to step into a world that does not exist yet. And in doing so, we are learning, slowly and imperfectly, to be a little more thoughtful, a little more flexible, and a little more present ourselves.

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About Anupma and Pranjal :

We are a young family of three, navigating careers, parenthood, and an ever-changing world with intention and a healthy dose of curiosity.

Pranjal has spent over 15 years across gaming, edtech, and AI, and currently builds multilingual voice agentic platforms for next-generation AI devices. He thinks in systems, speaks at conferences, and writes about the intersection of technology and human experience. Anupma brings over 12 years of expertise in digital and product marketing, with a sharp instinct for storytelling and building connections that actually mean something.

Together, they have chosen presence alongside ambition  believing the life you build at home matters just as much as the career you build outside it. Their home in Mumbai is full of plants, conversations, a curious six-year-old named Adya, and a cat who mostly disapproves of everything.

Outside work, they find joy in travel, fitness, gaming, and culture. More than anything, they value time spent together  unhurried, deliberate, and fully there.