Jaipur, 10–11 October 2026 — Third edition of the Global Happiness Forum & Festival

The invitation

A pink city, a global movement

The Global Happiness Forum & Festival (GHFF) has quietly grown, in three editions, into the largest happiness event in South-East Asia. What started as a local conversation in Jaipur is now a two-day convergence of scientists, policy-makers, artists, monks, artisans, teachers, entrepreneurs and citizens — organised by the World Happiness Foundation together with GHF and ST Foundation, Jaipur, with the generous sponsorship of the Kogta Foundation.

From 10 to 11 October 2026, we return to the Birla Auditorium. More than 35 international and national speakers, five book launches, six thematic sessions, four panels, a curated wellness exhibition and a Happiness Book Corner will fill the pink city with what its ancient walls have always known: that happiness is not decoration on a life, it is the shape of a mature life.

The foundation

How the World Happiness Foundation shapes with local institutions

The World Happiness Foundation does not parachute programmes into places. We work the way weavers work — thread by thread, with the people already holding the loom. In Jaipur that has meant a five-year friendship with the ST Foundation (co-organiser), the Kogta Foundation (sponsor), the Jaipuria Institute of Management, Jaipur National University and the Government of Rajasthan. Each edition of the Forum is not a broadcast, it is a co-authored season in a longer conversation.

This is what Happytalism looks like on the ground: happiness treated as public infrastructure, not private mood. Every dialogue in Jaipur is designed to leave something behind — a curriculum an institute can adopt on Monday, a policy brief a ministry can sign, a practice a family can carry home. The Forum is the visible fortnight of a year-round movement.

Artisans of Happiness

Where craft becomes a spiritual practice

Alongside the Forum we celebrate the Artisans of Happiness — the weavers, dyers, block-printers, potters and jewellers of Rajasthan whose hands hold a lineage older than most modern nations. With partners like Jaipur Rugs, we tell a simple, radical story: craft is not decoration for a global market, it is a spiritual practice that measurably improves the wellbeing of the artisan, their family and their village.

In our programme, an artisan sits on the same stage as an economist. A weaver from Bikaner explains why a knot tied with attention holds a different frequency than a knot tied under pressure. A scientist maps that same attention as a nervous-system state. Two languages, one truth: work done with love is a public good.

“An artisan who is happy is not producing a product. They are transmitting a state of being — and the object carries it into every home it enters.”

— Luis Miguel Gallardo

Schools of Happiness

Teaching children the inner curriculum

Our Schools of Happiness programme, developed with the Jaipuria Institute of Management and a growing network of educators across India, treats wellbeing as a first-class subject alongside literacy and numeracy. Children learn to name emotions, regulate the breath, sit with silence, resolve conflict without violence and recognise the wellbeing of the classroom as a shared responsibility.

In Jaipur we will hear from principals piloting the curriculum, from parents watching their children come home different, and from teachers who — often for the first time — are being trained in their own inner life before being asked to teach anyone else's. This is the quiet revolution: a generation raised knowing that happiness is a skill, not a lottery.

The book

The Transpersonal Leader — a launch that belongs on this stage

GHFF Jaipur is where I will launch, in South-East Asia, The Transpersonal Leader. The book is the distillation of two decades of work with founders, cabinets and community elders — an argument, and a practice, for leadership that stops managing people and begins to awaken them.

Its spine is the ROUSER model, six pillars of consciousness — Rise, Openness, Understanding, Service, Essence and Radiance — braided with the ICEF framework I've been building through the World Happiness Foundation: Interbeing, Consciousness, Essence and Fundamental peace. Together they describe a leadership that heals more than it hurts, regenerates more than it extracts, and endures beyond a single hero at the top.

The context

Why this movement, why now

We are living through the loudest crisis of meaning in modern memory. The old operating system of leadership — command, extract, defend — is running out of runway. What the World Happiness Foundation calls Happytalism is our attempt at a new one: a civilisational shift that measures progress by how human beings and the living world actually flourish, not by how much we can burn on the way there.

Jaipur is a fitting host. India carries in its bones a five-thousand-year conversation about consciousness, and today it is also one of the fastest-changing economies on earth. Holding both is exactly the transpersonal task: ancient wisdom, modern rigour, in the same breath.

The programme

Two days that connect wisdom, science and celebration

Across the two days, GHFF weaves keynotes and panels on the science of happiness, policy and business with sound healing, yoga, art therapy, music, dance, an artisans' pavilion and community zones. The intention is not to add another conference to the calendar, but to rehearse — in one auditorium, for two days — what a happier civilisation actually feels like from the inside.

When · Saturday 10 – Sunday 11 October 2026 · opens 11:00 IST (Asia/Kolkata) Where · Birla Auditorium, Jaipur, India Organisers · World Happiness Foundation · GHF · ST Foundation, Jaipur Sponsor · Kogta Foundation With · Jaipuria Institute of Management · Jaipur National University · Jaipur Rugs · Government of Rajasthan Book launch · The Transpersonal Leader by Prof. Luis Miguel Gallardo Details & registration · www.ghfjaipur.com

The circle

Come and be part of it

Whether you attend, exhibit, partner or simply follow along from afar — you are part of a movement that insists a happier world is not a soft ambition but the most serious infrastructure project of our century.

I hope to meet you in Jaipur. Bring a friend, bring a question, bring an open heart. That's how peace begins — not in a summit, but in a room.

One more evening. The day after the Forum closes, on Monday 12 October 2026, we launch the musical Unlocking Your Light Within in Jaipur. If you can, stay for it. Details → read the launch article · full vision at metapetsworld.org/unlocking.