Ramayan’s Arun Govil reacts to viral video of woman lying down holding his feet

Arun Govil was immortalised on-screen when he played Lord Ram in Ramanand Sagar’s TV epic Ramayan, 35 years ago. Cut to today, the actor continues to receive immense respect and adulation, evident from a video that’s been doing the rounds online of late. In the video, a woman, visibly in tears, is seen falling at Govil’s feet. As he requests a person with her to pick her up, the woman is seen on her knees with folded hands in front of him.

How does Govil react to such gestures? He tells us, “Yeh unn bhakton ke mann mein aata hai ki iss aadmi ke paaon chhoone hain, mera kya reaction aana chahiye ispe? I’ve always believed that they are not touching my feet, they are paying an ode to their own belief and faith. I am a mere symbol, Lord Ram made me that.”

Recalling the incident, the 64-year-old shares, “It was 6.30 in the morning. This woman saw me at the airport and screamed ‘Ram!’ She then caught my leg and literally rubbed her forehead on my shoe! I didn’t know what to do at that point, I couldn’t even bend to pick her up. When she calmed down a little, I tried to make her stand. She told me her husband is in the ICU. She had got a yellow dupatta, which she wanted to wrap around me. I told her, ‘Take this dupatta and make your husband wear it’.”

But, this isn’t the first time he has faced a situation of this kind. Initially, when someone would bow down to touch his feet, Govil says he would stop them from doing so. But, he gave in eventually. “People who are older than me would touch my feet. I would say, ‘Please aap aisa mat kijiye’. Someone said to me, ‘Do you have a problem?’ I said, ‘No, but my culture doesn’t allow elders to touch the feet of someone younger’. But, they insisted, so I agreed,” he says.