The Price of Waiting: How Deferring Your Creative Callings is Costing Your Career, Kids and Life.
Look around, and life is moving at breakneck speed. You’re in the thick of it, the whirlwind of raising kids, managing a career, and keeping a household running. You enjoy your work, or many parts of it. You deeply love your kids. But every once in a while you get this unsettling feeling: Am I losing a part of myself?
You used to have thriving creative pursuits - music, writing, dance, art, design, quirky projects. You were passionate about them. You were even great at them.
Then motherhood and career demands stepped in, and you told yourself a familiar story: "I’ll get back to them when things slow down."
Taking time for your own creative growth starts to feel like an impossible luxury or worse, a guilty distraction stolen from your family and job.
What if the very creative practice you’ve shelved is actually the secret weapon to thriving in your career, boosting your health, and raising resilient kids?
Join us for The Price of Waiting, an intimate, cozy lounge workshop hosted by PolyPaths. Together with host Apoorvaa Deshpande, distinguished architect and vocalist Praveena, and ex-techie and author Pranjali, we will dismantle the zero-sum myth that your callings compete with your life. Through research-backed evidence, honest storytelling, and interactive discussions, we will explore the hidden price of inaction and how to reclaim your vitality without guilt.
Guest speaker Pranjali Ganoo Kalsekar is a writer and former tech professional with over a decade of experience working on voice assistants such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Gemini. She recently transitioned from tech to pursue her passion for storytelling through novels, poetry, short stories, and children’s literature. A lifelong Bharatanatyam dancer and mother of two, Pranjali is passionate about creativity, personal growth, resilience, and embracing different paths in life.
Guest speaker Praveena Kuppa is a distinguished technology leader known for building high-performing teams, scaling complex systems, and guiding organizations through high-stake decisions. Alongside a demanding career, she has earned patents and is a Guinness World Record holder. She integrates the discipline of dance into execution, the listening of music into team culture, and the creativity of the arts into problem-solving, proving that range is not a distraction, but a pathway to deeper excellence.
Host Apoorvaa Deshpande is a Tech Lead for AI Privacy at Google and holds a PhD in Computer Science. She is also a senior musician with IndianRaga and an internationally performing artist. As a mother of two, Apoorvaa is deeply cares about embracing multidimensionality and creating a vibrant life beyond a single career identity. She is the founder of PolyPaths, which helps creative tech professionals design a life of of joy and fulfillment.
Meet our Chef - Tanvi Gupta
Tanvi Gupta is a data architect and surgical education researcher, passionate about using evidence-based research to shape the future of surgical training. Growing up in Bengal, food became an important part of her identity and a way of bringing people together. She loves cooking, growing her own food, thoughtfully curating menus, and creating meaningful experiences around the table. She is delighted to be your chef this evening.
Dinner & Evening Schedule
6:00–7:30 PM — Workshop & Panel Discussion
8:00–9:00 PM — Gourmet Dinner
WHAT WE WILL EXPLORE
We will move through three critical concepts quantifying the actual cost of delaying the things that light you up:
The Stagnation Tax: Why deferring your creative callings actually creates a cognitive drag on your career and problem-solving edge.
The Agency Leak: Why suppressing your autonomy is creating chronic stress, decision fatigue, and operational overhead in your daily life
The Mirror Cost: Why sacrificing your own needs and passions is not the emotional blueprint your children actually need to see
WHAT YOU WILL WALK AWAY WITH
Research-Backed Insights: Scientific clarity that permanently dissolves "mom-guilt" around taking time for your own growth.
Honest Stories & Validation: Real-world conversations with high-achieving women who chose not to wait, connecting with a room of moms who feel just like you.
Immediate Action Exercises: A clear, micro-commitment plan and boundary script to plug your agency leaks and start protecting your creative spark this very week.
Come share a warm cup, connect with an extraordinary room of women, and step back into your full, multifaceted self.