In 2013, a team from Harvard University observed the Kumbh Mela, the world’s largest religious celebration, from its preparation through to the actual gathering. Their work documented and analyzed the event from a variety of academic perspectives, ranging from urban planning, to religious and cultural studies, to public health. Professors Tarun Khanna, Diana Eck, and Tiona Zuzul contributed to a groundbreaking book on their findings, and Professor Khanna and Zuzul returned to the 2025 mega event to continue their study. Please join us to hear more about their work. Please RSVP below.
Tarun Khanna is Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School and first director of Harvard’s university-wide Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute. His various books range from Billions of Entrepreneurs, a first-person 2008 comparison of Chinese and Indian entrepreneurial ecosystems, to a 2022 co-edited collection of essays, Making Meritocracy, all chronicling the creativity exercised by entrepreneurs for societal development. At Harvard, he teaches at HBS and at Harvard College. His online course, Entrepreneurship in Emerging Economies, has been taken by nearly a million students in over 200 countries.
Diana Eck is the Professor of Comparative Religion and Indian Studies and the Emerita Frederic Wertham Research Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard University. Her academic work has a dual focus—India and America. Her work on India focuses on popular religion, especially temples and places of pilgrimage, called tirthas. Her books include Banaras: City of Light and Darsan: Seeing the Divine Image in India and her most recent work, India: A Sacred Geography, published in 2012. Among other honors, she received the National Humanities Award from President Bill Clinton and the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1998.
Tiona Zuzul is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Strategy Unit at the Harvard Business School. She teaches the MBA elective Making Difficult Decisions and contributes to various executive education programs. Professor Zuzul studies how leaders’ cognition and communication shape the decisions and behaviors that drive organizational outcomes. She received a doctorate from Harvard Business School, MSc from the London School of Economics, and AB from Harvard College, and has taught at the London Business School and the University of Washington.
To RSVP, email culture.newyork@mea.gov.in.
