Yoga for global good: PM leads celebrations
PM Modi led International Yoga Day celebrations in Srinagar, highlighting yoga's global impact. He emphasized its role in personal development and tourism growth.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi led the 10th International Yoga Day celebrations from Srinagar on Friday and said that the world was now looking at the practice as a “powerful agent” of public good. Modi, who was in Kashmir on the second of a two-day-visit, also said that yoga would soon become a boon for the tourism sector in the region, and morph into a valuable source of employment.
In 2014, the United Nations had declared June 21 as the International Day of Yoga with Modi inaugurating the first edition of the event a year later. Since then, the scale of celebrations has only grown, with Modi leading a yoga session at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York in 2023, where he described yoga as “truly universal” and a unifying force across ethnicities, faiths and cultures.
On Friday, even as Modi led a group of people inside the Sher-e-Kashmir International Convention Centre in Srinagar, politicians, bureaucrats, industrialists and actors conducted yoga sessions across the expanse of the country — from Kashmir to Kanyakumari; from Arunachal Pradesh to Rajasthan.
In Srinagar, where Modi was initially scheduled to lead the yoga session at 6.30am in the lawns of the SKICC but was forced indoors by the inclement weather, he said, “The world is looking at yoga as a powerful agent of global good. Yoga helps us live in the present moment without the baggage of the past. When we are peaceful within, we can also make a positive impact on the world... Yoga is making new ways of positive change in society.”
Modi said that the number of yoga practitioners was constantly on the rise globally, and wherever he went, he was often told by international leaders of the benefits of yoga. “In many countries, yoga is becoming a part of their daily lives,” he said.
This increased interest, he said, has led to yoga tourism in states like Uttarakhand and Kerala, with people from across the globe travelling to India to gain an authentic understanding of the practice. “People are now hiring personal yoga trainers for fitness, and companies are including yoga in mind and body programmes for their employees. It has opened new avenues of livelihood,” Modi said.
Modi said that the response to yoga from Jammu and Kashmir was heartening, calling it a spectacle of “enthusiasm and commitment”. “Today will be immortalised in the minds of people. Even the fall in temperature amid the rainy weather couldn’t dampen the spirit of the people... I have been seeing since yesterday that yoga is growing in popularity with the people of Srinagar and Jammu and Kashmir. This will attract more tourists here,” he said.
The Prime Minister said that yoga should be approached not just as a spiritual journey to find “Allah, Ishwar or God” but as a journey towards personal development. “If you approach it in that way, there are a lot of benefits. Personal development leads to the benefit of society, which in turn leads to the benefit of humankind,” Modi said.
Extolling the virtues of yoga for the mind, he said that it helped calm the modern mind which is flooded by information. “A solution for this is also in yoga as it helps the mind to focus. That is why from army to sports, yoga has been included in their routine... astronauts and people working on space projects are trained in yoga as it increases productivity as well as tolerance,” Modi said.
Kashmir lieutenant governor Manoj Sinha, who was at the event in Srinagar with the Prime Minister, said, “I am grateful to the Prime Minister for giving Jammu and Kashmir the opportunity to lead the International Yoga Day celebrations. This historic event has put Jammu and Kashmir on the global map. Yoga plays the most significant role in enhancing the physical, psychological and emotional aspects of our well-being. The Prime Minister has taken yoga to the world.”