New Delhi: The district magistrate in Uttar Pradesh's Bahraich has been grabbing the headlines with his speciality – headstands or ‘sirsasnas’. DM Dinesh Chandra Singh has also motivated the inmates of the district jail to include the yoga practice in their daily healthcare routine.
"Whenever the district magistrate visits the jail he inspects the barracks and encourages inmates to practice yoga," news agency PTI quoted Jailor Anand Shukla as saying.
"He himself performs various yogic exercises, including the headstand, before inmates and asks them to adopt yoga for a stress-free living," the jailor added.
According to Shukla, a majority of the prison inmates have made yoga a part of their daily routine now, and they have been telling them about its benefits.
"For the past couple of months, the number of inmates falling ill has gone down," Jailor Shukla added.
According to the PTI report, several jail officials said that even during administrative interactions, they were made aware of the positive side of yoga.
During his visits to schools and colleges, the DM makes it a point to inspire students to adopt the healthy practice.
According to DM Singh, he can perform headstands for a very long time, sometimes extending up to an hour, and has been invited by yoga guru Ramdev to his ashram in Haridwar.
"I started doing headstands for a shorter duration but the duration began increasing with practice. Now, I can comfortably do a headstand for close to an hour," he said.
Speaking about an incident in 2019, when he was posted as the DM in Aligarh, Singh recalled how a crowd of around 500 people at a yoga event was angry with the organisers and began protesting. But the DM was able to manage the crowd by urging them to perform yoga, he said.
Apart from public performances, several videos of Singh performing the headstand are available online. In one of the videos, he can be seen performing the headstand for almost an hour.
Singh further said that he is a devotee of Lord Hanuman and draws strength from him.