Tarun Khanna — 100 Million People, One Massive Experiment: The Maha Kumbh Mela

Researching the Maha Kumbh Mela — the religious festival that takes place every 12 years near Allahabad in north India, at which over 100 million Hindus gather — has more than its fair share of challenges. (And I'm not talking here about a tragic railway footbridge collapse or the incessant rain that flooded the tent city last week.) Setting up a live experiment is never easy and always exciting. Our goal: to trace ground-up the emergence of a market, and figure out the structures and mechanisms that will allow it to work more efficiently.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network / HBS Faculty
100 Million People, One Massive Experiment: The Maha Kumbh Mela
Tarun Khanna | Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, Director of Harvard University's South Asia Institute, and co-author of Winning in Emerging Markets: A Roadmap for Strategy and Execution (Harvard Business Press, 2010)

Awesome. 

Here's an interesting tidbit.

BBC News

Beatles song muse ['Dear Prudence"] visits India's Kumbh Mela

By Amitava Sanyal

Prudence Farrow, about whom John Lennon wrote the song Dear Prudence, is also sister of Hollywood actor Mia Farrow....

"India has changed so much since I first came here," says Ms Farrow, 65, sitting in the brightly-painted porch of her rented flat in Allahabad...

Ms Farrow, who has a doctoral degree in South Asian studies and runs foundations to promote meditation, says she was in search of "an inner silence".

But, ironically, the blare of three loudspeakers every morning at the festival grounds shattered her peace and she shifted into the city.

This was, she says, in sharp contrast to the peaceful times she spent with her sister Mia at her guru's retreat in Rishikesh in 1968.At the retreat, the Farrow sisters met the Beatles.

"Because of Mia there were too many people coming in and out of our block," says Ms Farrow.

"And then in the evenings George Harrison would jam with John Lennon and others would join in. I wasn't getting the silence.

"People said: 'You are being too fanatical, you should come out.'

Yes, I was extreme because I thought it was a privileged time. I still think it was the most important time in my life."

So while the rest of the students partied, Ms Farrow says she locked herself up in her room and practised meditation. 

That is when, she says, Lennon, wrote the song Dear Prudence, which appears on the band's White Album.