New Delhi: As the city of ‘nawabs’ gears up to host Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the country’s main Yoga Day event, a group of school students from Lucknow are practising to perform various asanas at the United Nations headquarters in New York.
A 72-member team of City Montessori School (CMS), Lucknow, will leave for the United States on Monday for a live performance at the UN headquarters on 21 June. On 19 May, they staged a special performance before Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath at his official residence.
“We have trained 72 students from different classes to perform at the mega event on Yoga Day at UN. It will also be attended by UN secretary general António Guterres,” CMS founder Jagadish Gandhi told PTI. “They will leave for the US tomorrow and also visit parts of New York during their stay. A special performance was arranged at the CM’s residence where the students were also awarded,” he added.
On PM Modi’s call, the UN General Assembly declared in December 2014 that 21 June would be observed as International Yoga Day every year. Lucknow will be hosting the main event for Yoga Day this year in which the PM and Adityanath will participate along with 55,000 people.
Besides Lucknow, the government had been considering Bhopal, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Ranchi and Bengaluru as possible venues for the mega event. The first Yoga Day celebration in the country was organised at Rajpath in New Delhi on 21 June 2015, in which representatives of 191 countries had participated. Last year, the main was organised in Chandigarh.