cities

Updated: Jun 28, 2017 14:06 IST

The Uttarakhand government will give away as presents a book on Hindu god Hanuman to its guests in keeping with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent advice that books make for a better gift than flowers.

Sada Safal Hanuman (Ever successful Hanuman), a management book, is on the list of books he BJP government, which recently completed 100 days in office, proposes to give away as presents.

“The books gifted to the visiting guests will showcase Uttarakhand’s culture, history, geography etc. A book titled – Sada Safal Hanuman -- will be gifted to the guests,” chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat said in an order on Tuesday.

Written by Vijay Agrawal, a retired bureaucrat, Sada Safal Hanuman is described as a book that seeks to draw inspiration from Hanuman’s life and sync it with management principles for a successful life.

The first book present has already gone out -- to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance’s presidential nominee Ram Nath Kovind, who is touring states to seek support for the July 17 election. He was presented the book on Monday, a day after Modi in his monthly radio address pitched for books in place of bouquets.

Hanuman is worshipped by Hindus for his devotion to god Ram and also his fabled strength. A demand for a Ram temple at the site of demolished Babri mosque in Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh has been central to the rise of the BJP in national politics. A section of Hindus believe the Mughal-era mosque, which was razed by a Hindu mob in 1992, had come up on a temple dedicated to Ram at his place of birth.

Uttarakhand has several Hindu holy sites and gets hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year. The Rawat government wants to build on it.

In May, the hill state’s tourism department started a trek to the Dronagiri mountain in Chamoli district. The mountain figures prominently in the Ramayana.

Tasked with getting the all-curing mythical herb Sanjeevani Booti to save the life of a gravely wounded Lakshman, the younger brother of Ram, Hanuman uprooted the Dronagiri and carried it all the way to the battlefield in Ravan’s Lanka.

After Lakshman’s miraculous recovery, Hanuman is believed to have brought back the mountain to its original place.