National Youth day (Rashtriya Yuva Diwas)

In news– National Youth Day is celebrated on January 12 every year to mark the birth anniversary of Swami Vivekananda.

About National Youth Festival-

The Ministry of Youth Affairs & Sports has been celebrating it with an objective of providing a platform to bring the youth of the country together in an attempt to provide them an opportunity to showcase their talents in various activities.
The 25th National Youth Festival is being celebrated in 2022 in partnership with Puducherry which is blessed with thoughts of both Sri Aurobindo and Mahakavi Subramania Bharathi.

About Swami Vivekananda(Narendranath Datta)-

He was born Narendranath Datta on January 12, 1863, in Kolkata, West Bengal.
He practiced meditation from a very early age and also joined the Brahmo Samaj movement for a certain period.
He later became the most-notable disciple of Ramakrishna, who demonstrated the essential unity of all religions.
He believed in the essential unity of man and god (Advaita).
He believed that it was only in selflessness and in consciously trying to serve the larger humanity that one truly gained a perspective on religion and God.
He stressed on the universal and humanistic side of the Vedas as well as belief in service rather than dogma.
He was a Hindu spiritual leader and reformer who attempted to combine Indian spirituality with Western material progress, maintaining that the two supplemented and complemented one another.
One of the greatest patriots, he was also credited for introducing Indian philosophies of Vedanta and Yoga to the western world.
He was one of the main representatives of Neo-Vedanta, a modern interpretation of selected aspects of Hinduism in line with western esoteric traditions, especially Transcendentalism, New Thought and Theosophy.
He is best known in the United States for his groundbreaking speech to the 1893 (11th September) World’s Parliament of Religions at Chicago ((This day is observed as “World Brotherhood Day)).
On his return to India with a small group of Western disciples in 1897, Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission at the monastery of Belur Math on the Ganga River near Calcutta (now Kolkata).
He died on 4th July 1902 and was cremated on a sandalwood funeral pyre on the bank of the Ganga in Belur, opposite where Ramakrishna was cremated sixteen years earlier.
In 1985, the Government of India declared his birthday – January 12, as National Youth Day.