An artful mind: Munjal says future leaders need both STEM and the arts

Lunch with BS: Sunil Kant Munjal, Chairman, Hero Enterprise, and Founder, Serendipity Arts Foundation

A couple of hours before I am to meet Sunil Kant Munjal for lunch at Indian Accent in New Delhi, his office calls. The chairman of Hero Enterprise has just returned from his travels abroad and would prefer to eat at home. I feel a sudden thrill. Munjal is known for his beautiful residence, but as a private person, he rarely opens it to the media and routinely declines requests from architectural magazines to feature it. 

The house in Friends Colony, approached through lush greenery and a warm welcome from his staff, reflects an owner deeply attuned to art. There is exquisite floor inlay, walls lined with works by modern masters and, on a centre table, a blue sculpture by Anish Kapoor, Munjal’s schoolmate from Doon. Heavy woodwork and ornate chandeliers sit easily alongside all the art. “All of this was done by craftsmen on site,” he says. Technology, meanwhile, works in the background, invisible. The home is a tribute to Indian craftsmanship, executed with modern restraint.

 

Munjal is a committed patron of the arts, and this year is particularly special. The Serendipity Arts Festival, which he launched in Goa in 2016 and which will run from December 12 to 21 in Panjim, turns 10. What began as a low-attendance event — “locals didn’t believe something of this scale could be free, so we put out a newspaper announcement”— is today one of the world’s largest multidisciplinary arts gatherings, drawing artists from 20-30 countries, visitors from as many as 60, and crowds of around 100,000 a day. 

Over sweet, salty, refreshing lemonade, Munjal goes back in time, to growing up in a family that would eventually become one of India’s most respected business houses. They had migrated from Kamalia in Pakistan Punjab’s Toba Tek Singh (immortalised by Saadat Hasan Manto’s story) during Partition, and settled in Ludhiana. “They came with nothing, and set up everything from scratch,” says Munjal, who is the youngest son of Hero Group founder Brijmohan Lall Munjal. 

Born 10 years after Independence, his upbringing was middle-class, with emphasis on frugality, respect for elders, and fixed mealtimes. Yet two elements set the home apart. First, business was a constant presence — extended family lived in connected houses, and conversations flowed freely. Second, the arts were central. Senior musicians, saints and intellectuals performed at home and in their factories. “Ravi Shankar performed in our living room, as did Alla Rakha,” he recalls. 

After Class 3, Munjal went to boarding school — Punjab Public School in Nabha, then Doon — where his exposure to the arts expanded. Doon had a strong art faculty (Rathin Mitra, before him Sudhir Khastgir, and later Aloke Tirtha Bhowmick), and students tried their hands at sculpture, painting, music and pottery. Munjal played the drums and worked with wood and metal. This early immersion shaped his belief in the interconnectedness of artistic disciplines. 

The seed for Serendipity was planted in 1999, during a train conversation about Ludhiana’s absence of cultural spaces. Back home, Munjal gathered friends and launched the Ludhiana Sanskritik Samagam, which continues to stage performances every few weeks. After moving to Delhi around 2000, he was urged to replicate the initiative. He and his wife — a theatre lover and active pianist — attended shows regularly, but something felt amiss. “The arts seemed to have become the exclusive domain of very few,” he says. Equally troubling was the siloing of disciplines. Colonisation, he believes, fractured the integrated learning that once allowed students to experience multiple art forms — painting, sculpting, dance, music, theatre.

 

By 2014, he was funding fellowships and sending artists abroad for training, even contemplating a museum to house the collection he had been putting together since he was a teenager. “But the impact I was making was too little.” The solution was a public festival — interdisciplinary, accessible and ambitious. Goa, recovering from a shutdown of its mining industry and looking to deepen tourism, proved the right fit. With support from Manohar Parrikar, then defence minister and former Goa chief minister, and later the state government, the first Serendipity Arts Festival opened in 2016 in the restored Adil Shah Palace. When officials warned that the heritage building was unusable, Munjal offered to fix it. “You give us permission, we’ll do the work,” he told them.

 

The name “Serendipity” came from his wife’s former bookstore at The Claridges hotel in Delhi — an old favourite that closed during renovations but lived on in memory until he revived it for the festival. 

Our conversation continues as we head to the dining room for lunch, past more art-lined walls. The Punjabi spread on the table feels like home: Daal makhani garnished with cream, shahi paneer, gobhi-aaloo, bhindi, bharta, raita, sprouts salad, with jeera rice and roti. The gracious host serves the creamy daal, while I help myself to the rest of the dishes. The food is delicious, light on spices, heavy on flavours. 

Munjal’s instinct to move across disciplines — industry, culture, education — runs deep. “I received many opportunities very early on,” he says. The family had a system: Anyone joining the business underwent structured training across functions. Later, he worked with industry bodies, management associations, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), of which he was president, and government committees, including the Kelkar Committee on indirect taxes, and the Narasimham Committee on banking and financial sector reforms. Exposure to diverse fields, he believes, made him better at problem-solving. “If I had less exposure to the arts, maybe I wouldn’t have been able to work on so many different things,” he says. “Culture broadens your understanding of people.”

 

This thinking underpins his education initiatives, the most significant of which is the BML Munjal University (BMU). Founded in 2014, he says it had value-based learning and multidisciplinary thinking embedded in it, with intense focus on experiential curriculum: 40-48 per cent of the learning is hands-on. “MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) faculty visiting the campus remarked on its scale; Imperial College London helped shape the early framework,” he says, as the staff walks in with more rotis. “Global companies such as Siemens have set up centres of excellence on campus, and Shell has its tribology lab here. Students learn by solving real problems in real environments.” 

BMU also borrows from liberal arts structures, with an unusual twist: Five electives are compulsory. Ethics and moral dilemmas; physical social work; cross-disciplinary learning; design thinking; and soft skills. “Soft skills are teachable,” he insists, “and essential.” This approach has expanded to other initiatives too, such as a STEAM House in Ludhiana — where “A” stands for arts, the rest being science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM). This STEAM House supports students, adults, and micro, small and medium enterprises with training, problem-solving, and incubation. 

I realise I have eaten more than I should have when kheer arrives, but how can one decline this wonderful dry fruit-sprinkled dessert? It is perfect: Cold, creamy, with just the right amount of sugar. 

The conversation resumes after this sweet interruption. While entrepreneurship is another throughline, Munjal is no longer involved with the family’s core occupations. When the family voluntarily restructured its businesses, twice, he stepped out, first of the bicycle business and then the motorcycle and scooter business. “I realised I had a unique freedom to choose anything. Most people in the world don’t have this privilege,” he says. 

He noticed a vacuum: Good ideas lacked mentorship and early capital. Along with friends, he helped seed India’s first angel network — the Indian Angel Network — before moving to venture investing, encouraging global funds to enter India by investing in them. What began with small cheques evolved into the Hero Enterprise’s investment office, which is now active across bonds, structured debt, public markets and private equity. 

Their startup investments span financial services, health tech, consumer-tech, advanced manufacturing (including rockets and satellites), sustainability, and deep tech. The criteria to invest are unconventional: They evaluate the founders first — for their integrity, values, culture, passion — and then whether the idea solves a real need and benefits society. Only after that comes the business plan. “Brilliant people who can’t collaborate cannot scale,” says Munjal who has recently been conferred the Chevalier de l’Ordre national du Mérite (Knight of the National Order of Merit) by the French ambassador to India. 

We return to his passion: Serendipity. Each edition features 12-14 accomplished yet collaborative curators. Early curators included classical musician Shubha Mudgal and theatre veteran Annu Kapoor. 

He is of the view that accessibility is where Serendipity has truly carved a distinctive space. The team builds ramps in old structures, and adapts venues and designs programming for communities typically excluded from cultural events. Each morning, before public access begins, the festival hosts street children, orphans, transgender visitors, elders from care homes, and people with disabilities. These groups receive tailored experiences and can choose to stay on for the day. 

The impact has been profound, says Munjal, recounting a Goan parent of a severely autistic child who had never taken his son out: “After attending, the child’s behaviour changed so dramatically that the father returned in tears.” The festival also creates tactile models of major artworks for visually impaired visitors. 

Demand has grown so sharply that the festival now charges nominal fees for closed venues, while keeping prices low and allowing schools free entry. Beyond the festival itself, Serendipity works year-round with 280 schools in Goa to integrate arts 

education into their curriculum. For Munjal, this is essential in a country where STEM has long overshad­owed the arts. “Future leaders,” he says, “need both halves of the brain.” 

International participation, too, has expanded through partnerships across Europe, East Asia, North America, and Australia. Artists collaborate with Indian practitioners, creating what Munjal calls a “win-win bridge” between cultures. This 10th anniversary edition is Serendipity’s largest yet, with some 40 of the festival’s 60-odd current and former curators returning —“no other global festival has attempted this,” he says. 

Spread across Panjim’s heritage corridors, pavements, parks and even sunset boat cruises, Serendipity now hosts workshops with senior chefs, musicians and potters; conclaves on arts and technology, or arts and health; and conversations on emerging formats, including artificial intelligence. 

The festival’s scale makes it impossible to see everything in a single visit. Munjal sees value in this: “Being forced to choose teaches decision-making.” The organisation is now taking curated satellite versions of Serendipity to other cities. In May, it also held a mini version in Birmingham, United Kingdom. 

The Covid-19 pandemic brought an unexpected test. It also accelerated an idea he had been nurturing quietly: A permanent space for the arts, shaped by Serendipity’s multidisciplinary spirit. With the world at a standstill and architects, designers and contractors idle, he urged the team to begin building. The result is The Bridge, a forthcoming arts centre in Delhi’s Vasant Kunj. Excavation and structural work are complete, with concrete work beginning soon. The project will take three more years. “We’re building something unique,” he says: An enduring home for the arts, not a museum in the traditional sense but a space for dialogue, creation, research, and collaboration. 

These strands — arts, education, entrepreneurship, industry — are, to him, parts of one continuum. They reflect a worldview in which creativity and economic growth reinforce each other, and where India’s future depends on building ecosystems, not silos.