There has been turmoil in the virtual world since 38-year-old Karan Kundrra’s inappropriate video ‘romancing’ 12-year-old Riva Arora has gone live. The latter rose to prominence for her role in the movie Uri, where she played the daughter of martyred Colonel MN Rai and roared a Gorkha war cry at the funeral scene. The child artist was only 9-years-old at that time. At age 10, she essayed the role of young Janhvi in the movie Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl. This makes her 12 now.
During these years, apart from movies, Riva has also appeared in several television commercials as a child artist. Her child-like innocence was visible in her appearance during those years. However, things started to take a weird turn lately after Riva began to gain popularity on YouTube and Instagram. She had all of a sudden become an ‘influencer’, and her looks changed radically.
While the change in growing children of this age is not out of the line, the difference in Riva’s appearance and behaviour was drastic and unnatural. Just when the audience had started to note this strange change, she posted a reel with actor Karan Kundrra. In the reel, she plays an adult with romantic links with two men. The reel is made in a bar set-up when the 12-Year-old sits in a revealing attire with her legs crossed. The facial expressions are creepy and awful for her age. Netizens were disturbed because Riva is not only years away from being an adult, she has not even hit her teen years. She is a child.
The uproar over this reel encouraged us to look further into her Instagram account. And we found that the account was loaded with pictures of Riva in clothes and actions that do not suit her age and is a textbook example of child sexualization. She has posted disturbing pictures and videos with several adult men, and the comments section is brimming with inappropriate comments with a sexual undertone.
What is shocking in this is that her Instagram is handled by her mother. How a mother allows her pre-teen daughter to feature in such pictures and videos is pathetic and incomprehensible. The sexualization of a child like Riva, whose Instagram is handed by her parent, also exposes the desperate need for social media attention at the cost of self-worth and, as in this case, childhood.
The concern is not just about the content of Riva’s videos but also her physical appearance. While Hindupost has not confirmed the veracity of these claims, some netizens have alleged that her parents have used hormone therapy or steroids to alter her looks and growth.
Such allegations of expediting natural growth had surfaced against Hansika Motwani’s parents also when she had appeared as an adult opposite Himesh Reshammiya in the movie Aap Kaa Saroor just three years after acting as a minor in Hrithik Roshan’s Krrish. Hansika was just 16, a minor romancing a 34-year-old Himesh Reshammiya. This is not the first time Bollywood has faced allegations of paedophilia, and children have been victims of over-ambitious parents.
Bollywood glorifies paedophilia, and it has done this since its inception. The original Telugu song “Srivalli” from Pushpa praises the “18 years” of the heroine’s youth. But in its Hindi dubbing, which is replete with Urdu words, the girl’s age is reduced to 16. In fact, “Jawani” has always been associated with the age “16” in Bollywood. This prompted youth to indulge in a relationship before they attained the maturity to understand the implications of these connections. This industry has seldom tried to narrate a meaningful story and has always driven youth toward the immoral.
