New Delhi: Filmmaker Anurag Kashyap says he has a problem with actor and Member of Parliament Ravi Kishan’s recent statement about the ‘drug abuse problem’ in the film industry. Kashyap claimed that Ravi Kishan used to smoke weed himself. Before denying the claims made by the filmmaker, Ravi Kishan said that he doesn’t want to give any explanation to anybody about his past.
Reacting to Kashyap’s remarks, Ravi Kishan told media, “I didn’t expect such words from Anurag Kashyap. It’s no secret I am a devotee of Shiva so I chant his name. I’m saddened he would not support me on this issue of the war on drugs and say that I smoked up and I am clean now just because I’m a minister, which I’m not.”
Anurag spoke to journalist Faye D’Souza about how Ravi’s stand irked him. “Ravi Kishan acted in my last film Mukkabaaz. Ravi Kishan starts his day by saying Jai Shiv Shankar, Jai Bam Bhole. Jai shiv Shambhu For the longest period of his time, he has been somebody who has used weed. It is life. Everybody knows it. The whole world knows. There’s not a single person who doesn’t know that Ravi Kishan does not smoke up. He might have quit now, that he has become a minister, he might have cleaned up.”
“But do you include that in drugs? No. I am not judging Ravi, because I have never seen weed as a drug. ‘Abuse’ is not the word. He used to smoke up. He has always been functional, he has always done his job well, it did not make him dysfunctional, did not make him a monster. It did not do anything that people associate with drugs,” he added. “So when he talks about it, when he takes a self-righteous stand, I have a problem with that,” he said.
In the same interview, Anurag also talked about his own struggle with harder, chemical drugs between 2006-2008.
“Before I did DevD, I went through a personal phase of drugs between 2006 and 2008 out of depression and my films not releasing. When I got into that phase because I had invisible asthma I was more abusing chemical drugs at that time. It was a massive shame for me. I would hide and try to procure them and find out secretively where to get them. My biggest fear was that nobody found out that I was doing that. I started talking about it (the drug phase) much later in 2014. But those two-and-a-half years when I did that, all of my experience I’d put it in DevD, from the sense of shame associated with it to the way I would hide it and not want anyone to find out about it,” he said.
