Women Perform Special Ganga Aarti at Rishikesh to Welcome Iran-Israel-US Ceasefire
When the guns fell silent across West Asia, the lamps were lit on the Ganga.
At Purnanand Ghat in Rishikesh — where the river does not pause for the affairs of nations, yet has always carried within it the prayers of all humanity — women gathered as the evening descended, brass lamps in hand, to offer something the world had been waiting for: gratitude, and hope.
Under the Rishikesh Ganga Aarti Trust, as part of the world’s first Women-led Ganga Aarti, a special ceremony was performed to welcome the two-week ceasefire agreed upon by Iran, Israel, and the United States. In the days preceding this moment, the spectre of widening conflict had loomed over West Asia and beyond. And so, as news of the ceasefire arrived, these women — devotees, mothers, seekers — chose not silence, but prayer.
Flames moved in arcs above the water. Chants rose and dissolved into the mountain air. And in that ancient gesture of the aarti, something deeply human was being said: that peace, wherever it blooms, deserves to be welcomed with a sacred flame.
Hariom Sharma ‘Gyani Ji’, President of the Trust, noted that this ceasefire carries within it the seed of something larger — the possibility of permanent peace in West Asia — and urged the world’s nations to seize this moment together.
Among those who stood at the ghat that evening, lamps raised to the river and to the sky, were Dr. Jyoti Sharma, Acharya Sonia Raj, Poonam Rawat, Anjana Uniyal, Pushpa Sharma, Vandana Negi, Gayatri, Pramila, Rajni Rawat, and many others — their presence a reminder that some of the world’s most necessary prayers are offered not in parliament halls, but at the water’s edge.
