How yoga came to the UN

Among the many rabbits that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has produced out of his hat, the one that has multiplied fastest is yoga as part of the Indian smart power, which has the potential to influence the world.

As author Manil Suri has observed in his New York Times column, ‘A practice with Vedic origins that has nevertheless attained such secular popularity is the perfect vehicle to create a shared national consciousness.’ The proposal that such a seemingly innocuous exercise of the body and the mind should be given an International Day by the United Nations was a masterstroke in itself.

There is no automaticity about any Indian idea getting accepted at the UN and, therefore, Modi chose an irresistible concept, which had already been recognised around the world. But it took some efforts by our mission to the UN to find 175 countries to sponsor and to get it adopted without a vote. Though 175 countries co-sponsored the relevant resolution, 16 countries refrained from doing so for one reason or another. Perhaps to ensure wide support, India is not even mentioned in the relevant resolution.

Any proposal to declare a new International Day at the UN meets with resistance because many such Days have been declared already at the instance of various member-States and the secretariat normally maintains that there is a ban on declaring more Days. It was almost 10 years ago that the idea of a Yoga Day was mooted by some NGOs, but it had no takers till Prime Minister Narendra Modi realised its potential, probably at the instance of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.

Among the Days declared so far, only the most significant ones such as UN Day, Human Rights Day, Women’s Day etc are celebrated and many others are easily forgotten such as the World Toilets Day. Yoga was accepted because the general familiarity it had acquired in the West, particularly at the UN.

Yoga was introduced to the UN in the early ’seventies by a humble junior clerk in the Indian consulate in New York, who became a yoga and meditation guru of many celebrities in New York, including the then secretary general of the UN, U Thant. With the assumed name of Sri Chinmoy, he himself became a celebrity by the time he passed away in 2007.

Chinmoy established his first meditation centre in Queens, New York, and eventually attracted thousands of students in 60 countries. Since April 1970, he began giving meditation lessons in a room assigned to him. A prolific author, artist, poet, and musician, he advocated, in addition to meditation, athleticism to achieve spiritual enlightenment, including distance running, swimming, and weightlifting.

Towards the evening of his life, he started a project of “lifting” in a special contraption many celebrities, who visited the UN. Among the hundreds he “lifted” were presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers and ambassadors. Mikhail Gorbachev was one of them. I too had received an invitation to be “lifted”, but I was not too sure that it was safe. Even today, we can see many members of the UN staff coming to work in white kurtas and saris, identifying themselves as the disciples of Sri Chinmoy.