PM leads 50,000 people, mostly school students and youth, on fourth international yoga day, does 20 asanas and three pranayams.
International Yoga Day 2018 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi led 50,000 people on Thursday morning to mark the fourth international day of yoga here and said that the ancient Indian knowledge system fosters amity, which can form the basis of national unity and universal peace in these fractious times.
Modi addressed the participants in Hindi and, uncharacteristically, in English as well, as he reached out to yoga enthusiasts across the world, and for 40 minutes led the way to perform 20 yogic and three pranayama, or breathing, exercises in the backdrop of Dehradun’s iconic Forest Research Institute building.
“Dehradun to Dublin, Shanghai to Chicago, Jakarta to Johannesburg, Himalayan highlands or sunburnt deserts, Yoga is enriching millions of lives across the world,” the PM told the participants, comprising predominantly school students and youths. The PM and participants performed yoga on mostly saffron yoga mats, with a sprinkling of blue coloured mats as well, on a green carpet.
Dehradun was picked as the venue for the fourth edition of the event, also the last before the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The PM as well as Uttarakhand Chief Minister Trivendra Singh Rawat spoke of the spiritual importance of Uttarakhand, which they said was home to the ‘char dham’ – Hindu religion’s preeminent pilgrimage centres.
Rawat pointed out that it was thanks to the PM’s efforts that the state now had an all-weather road for visiting the four pilgrimage centres, or char dham, and that he prays to the deities of Kedarnath and Badrinath to bless the PM’s vision of shaping a ‘new India’.
Modi said river Ganga originated in Uttarakhand, and it was also the birthplace of yoga and Ayurveda. He said yoga contributed to national unity, and has become one of the most powerful unifying forces in the world. The PM said India needed to learn to respect its cultural heritage, and his espousal of yoga in the last three years has inspired many individuals to take it up and several institutions devoted to the study and propagation of yoga have come up.
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