The kind of view that makes everyone stop and stare.
As the first light touches Jaipur, a balloon rises slowly against the golden sky, unhurried, silent, almost dreamlike. There is something quietly powerful about watching something so vast float with such ease. No engine. No rush. Just the slow, graceful ascent into the open sky of Rajasthan. From the ground, it is its own kind of wonder. The scale of it. The stillness of it. The way it makes the world feel both enormous and intimate all at once. This is not a backdrop. This is a moment that lands in the chest before it registers in the mind
The night begins with music, builds through story, and ends with fire.
Before the sky lights up, the soul does. Once Upon India is a memory you never knew you had. Rooted in the belief that you cannot know where you are going until you know where you came from, OUI weaves India’s most soulful stories into sound, folk songs carried by wind, melodies that have outlived empires, words that feel like home. At Mundota Fort, where the stones themselves remember, they will bring their baithak to the courtyard. You will not just listen. You will feel the weight of a civilisation singing to you. And when the last note dissolves into the night air, when the silence is full and the heart is open, the sky will catch fire. Once Upon India does not open the show. It opens you.
Ancestral beats meet the wild freedom of jazz at heart.
As dusk settles over Mundota, the first strike of the Nagada rises like a distant storm across the fort walls. Nathulal Solanki, master of Rajasthan’s most primal percussion tradition, invites the ancient pulse of the desert into dialogue with the fluid soul of jazz. What unfolds is neither concert nor ceremony- it lives in the breath between the two. Rhythms spiral through the palace courtyard, raw and hypnotic, while improvisation moves like firelight across stone. The music carries both devotion and rebellion, rooted in tradition yet restless within it. Beneath the open sky of Mundota, Jazz Nagada becomes something that is easier to feel than to name.
After sunset, Mundota reveals what daylight never could.
As night deepens over Mundota, Moonlight transforms the fort into a living composition of light, shadow and atmosphere. Created by internationally acclaimed visual designer Koert Vermeulen, this is not an installation you observe, it is a world you move through. Architectural surfaces dissolve into unexpected geometries. Darkness becomes structural. Light falls exactly where it was always meant to fall, revealing textures of the fort that only exist after sunset. Inspired by the emotional power of immersive environments, Moonlight works with precision rather than spectacle; quiet, architectural and exact. For one evening, Mundota does not merely hold history. It glows with it.
Ancient stone, reimagined into light, texture and wonder.
Throughout the summit, Dreamscape Installation quietly transforms Mundota into a dreamscape of light, texture and atmosphere. Created by Ihti Anderson, the installation flows through the fort like a living presence, suspended forms, soft illuminations and shifting reflections appearing unexpectedly across ancient stone corridors and open courtyards. By night, the palace begins to glow differently. Shadows move, light breathes across the architecture, and familiar spaces feel strangely otherworldly. More than décor, Dreamscape Installation becomes part of the emotional pulse of the summit, subtle, immersive and something you’ll find yourself returning to, even within a single evening.
Creation is a loop. You shape it, then it reshapes you.
There is a thread between two things. You cannot see it. You cannot name it. But when Elizaveta Poliakova moves, you feel it the invisible pull between a body and the world it inhabits, between control and surrender, between what holds and what lets go. The Fragile Connection is not a performance about fragility. It is fragility, made visible. A choreography born not from intention alone but from pressure, friction, resistance, the body finding its way through a landscape that refuses to stay still. What emerges is precise. What emerges is unpredictable. And in the space between those two things, something true appears. Come not to observe. Come to feel what connects you to everything around you and how little it takes to break it and how quietly it reforms.
A timeless afternoon of live polo, long lunches and Rajasthan
open skies.
Polo found its modern soul in Rajasthan. The open ground, the dust, the speed of horses, this is a sport that was made for landscape like this, and landscape like this was made for it. The match is live. The lunch is long. The afternoon has no agenda and no keynote. Just October sun, the Aravalli ranges in the distance and one of the oldest games in the world played the way it was always meant to be in the open air, at full speed, with nowhere else to be.
The Aravallis at your back, the music ahead, and the top of the Fort.
It’s a party.
The sun drops behind the Aravalli ranges and the 500-year-old walls of the War Fort do something unexpected, they come alive. DJ Vic takes the rooftop as the last light leaves the sky. Below, the city of Jaipur stretches out in every direction. Above, the stars arrive one by one over Rajasthan. And around you, a hundred people who have spent the day in rooms thinking hard about what experience means now simply inside one. No agenda. No facilitation. Just the fort, the music, and what happens when you stop designing and start feeling.
A sacred gathering of sound, ritual and collective presence
beyond performance.
Nakaloka is not a concert. It is a sacred immersive experience, a gathering designed to create what its creators call a radical unified field beyond dogma, beyond performance, beyond the ordinary boundary between artist and audience. Monica Dogra brings it to the palace courtyard at Mundota. Sound, ceremony and collective presence in one of India’s most storied settings. You will not be a spectator. You will be part of what happens. What that means, you will only discover once you are inside it.
