Victims of child abuse “blissfully innocent and oblivious” of what they get into!

Anurag Kashyap is playing the role of a child abuser in an upcoming Hindi film titled, “My name is Abhimanyu”. The man who confesses to himself being sexually abused during his childhood for eleven years at a stretch had broken down during the shooting of the film.

Talking of the pain he went through while essaying the role, Anurag has said something that has totally upset the cockles of my heart. “The child whom I had to abuse on screen was blissfully innocent and oblivious of what I was doing. By entering the mind of a child abuser, I realised what I’d been through as a child,” Anurag reminisced.

To illustrate his point further Anurag recounted the behaviour of the child artiste at the end of a particular shot in which Anurag, who plays the child’s stepfather in the film had to give the little kid a bath. “The child actor doesn’t have a father in real life. He was completely taken up by the act of his screen father, me, bathing him. After the shot, he ran to his mother to ask why he didn’t have a father to bathe him in this way. That’s when I realised how easy and how sinful it is for a man to sexually abuse a child. A simple routine exercise like a father bathing a child could be entirely stripped of its innocence by the man perpetrating the act,” pondered a disturbed Anurag. The actor considers essaying that particular scene as the toughest part of the entire shoot.

“My name is Abhimanyu” is yet to be released. What has already released though to the glare of the public eye and is being played out in gory detail on television news channels these days is the tale of William Heum, a Dutch national arrested on charges of perpetrating child abuse under the shade of an orpahanage he has been operating in India.

William Heum’s is a chilling case of how paedophilia has got firmly entrenched in India in the garb of western philanthropy. But then, that’s another story which can go by the title, “My name is William Heum”!

- myVox