 Hello, welcome to Entrepreneur India, today we have Hero Enterprise Chairman and Serenipati Art Foundation Founder Patron, Mr. Sunil Khan Munjal with us. Welcome Mr. Munjal. Thank you. So Mr. Munjal, I would like to start with, how and why did you start Serenipati Art Foundation? You know, we are quite lucky that as a nation, we have one of the richest cultural heritage in the world, but what's sad is a lot of it is actually going away, it's dying or declining and does not appear to have enough patronage. For us to not be doing more was something that I felt was not fair, it was not right. So actually I didn't start from here, we started this 20 years ago, we set up a similar organization in Lujiana, called the Lujiana Sanskritic Samadam, which was only for the performing arts, and that is still continuing, it has done over 100 performances of every kind of performance art form. When we moved here in Delhi, many of our friends used to say, you know, why you do all this in Lujiana, why not here in Delhi, so my own feeling was there's plenty of opportunities in Delhi, but when we looked around we found it was wonderful initiatives going on individually in each art form, but there was not one which looked at the collective arts together, so that was one of the reasons of setting up the Serendipity Arts Foundation, is to figure out a way to encourage the arts as the art forms used to be in India, the pre-British time, and that we felt would be a useful thing, alongside encouraging and propagating the arts. The festival is obviously a very public event, so it gets talked about, it gets advertised, it gets publicized, because the football runs into lakhs every year, the number of artists which come in are very large, even just in the one performing arts, we have over 2000 artists coming in and 10% of them come from overseas, so and this festival has grown both in size, scale, and quality year on year, every year. If I think back from where we started on 2016 and where we are today, it's been a long distance in a short time. We have become one of the major supporters and promoters of performance arts, it's a relatively new art form, or a relatively new art form getting attention worldwide, first in the US then it will be in Japan and Korea and the Serendipity Arts Foundation is now considered one of the big champions of performance arts. We have built a festival where not only is everybody welcome, but everybody is also included, so we have for example wheelchair access to all venues of the festival, we have sign language experts for deaf and mute visitors and even for visually challenged and blind visitors, we have braille catalogs and tactile markets of important pieces which you can touch and feel and for all of them we have curated walks every day of the festival. This year, last year because it was in December, in December this time we also organized special programs for people with learning disabilities and mental challenges, so the idea is to continue to expand the scope of people who can come in. We encourage the young, we work in many many schools, we invite school children every day, we also invite street children from street, we also go to some of the orphanages to invite children from there and we also invite the elderly, so that everybody becomes a part of this. It is yes. So Goa is a unique place, it has a culture which is very inclusive exactly like the festival that we're talking about. Goa is also one of the few cities in the country which has the ability to house a large event. Any large event needs lots of place for people to travel, to stay, facilities to run an event like this. And also Goa has the last 10 or 15 years has become the home to many artists, creative people, authors, artists and you know, poets, many of them have gone and settled there. The other places where you could possibly do it is the big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hanuman etc. while they're all equipped but we felt that we should first try and set up in a place where when people go they either go to relax or on a holiday or will specially come and stay at the festival and we were fortunate that's how it worked out and Goa has now embraced this festival as its own. So we get many messages from people from Goa asking you know when is the next one, what are you going to do because the quality of the festival is completely world-class. It's like an international festival taking place because we do use some of the top minds in India as curators. We have 14 curators who work on this festival. In addition to that, we have always had between five and ten special projects by other high-quality artists. So this is an interesting question you ask because we don't often think about the long-term impact of something like this. So we had a study done, an impact study done a couple of years ago and the result was actually quite profound as to the impact it's having on people and economic activity in and around that place. So many people said my kid who had no interest now wants to do arts or crafts or music in his or her school and we know that many of the artists who came there got encouraged set up other training schools. We know that the economic activity in and around Goa at that time when the festival takes place is dramatically heightened. Obviously because of the kind of football that we have which runs into lags, many visitors come, so the hotels do well, the flights do well, the taxis do well, the restaurants do well, the shops do well. So it benefits everybody. So it's like a win-win for everybody. So we have been wonderfully supported by the government and the government machinery of the state and I think that is why we are also getting these messages and calls from other states to bring this to them and the long-term impact I guess will only be known in the long term because we're only four years old but the signs are very clear that it will have an impact on people's personality, their ethos, their interests and their ability to adopt the arts as very much a part of their lives and or also their professions. So this was one of the reasons actually when we were starting up, setting up the foundation, we felt that many of the rich traditions and cultures which have been around in India and South Asia for centuries, they're not declining and just going away because exactly as you said it's not liberative. People cannot make a living only on that. So we actually tried some experiments to see if we could help some of them contemporize their skills. Using the same skill, make products with design, colors, materials which are usable by people around us today which people would buy and use in their homes and their offices to place a work and we thought that would be both innovative, creative and a practical thing to do and in the very first version of the festival in 2016 we had Manju Nirola who's the Secretary of the World Crafts Council and she's very actively involved of course in the Crafts Council of India and Dr. Jotinder Jain who's probably the finest mind in crafts and creativity that India has produced. Both of them went around, met with such artisans including Varanasi since you mentioned Varanasi and also went to Adivasis and the other rural areas where a lot of these skills lie and helped them create new words which when they were set up at the festival people just couldn't believe what amazing things that Indian artisans can actually produce. In fact people first objected they said oh this is not handmade or they said oh this is not Indian and so fortunately we had both the curators and in many cases the actual artisans who had done the work so we said here's the artisan we talked to him or to her and here's the curator who designed this and it was a sense of joy it gives you when you see an objective being made of this nature which is both creative and socially useful but not enough is being done in this area it's a very important question you're raising. I think India needs to focus much much much much more than we have done and I'm saying it many times only for this reason because not a lot of people realize that the number of people engaged in this profession runs anywhere from 100 to 200 million which is by the way the larger than any other industry that we have in this country and the awareness and focus of this of policy makers of governments of regulators seems to be very low it's seen as something esoteric something you know nice to talk about but I'm not sure we've done enough to encourage more of these to grow so that instead of leaving these professions not only people stay on but more get engaged because this is the true strength of India and India's soft power.