MID-DAY (May 27, 2014)

Often actors are forced to step out of their comfort zone. That’s exactly what happened to Pawan Malhotra when he was shooting for Mrityunjay Devvrat’s recently released film, Children of War.

Based on the atrocities that led to the liberation of Bangladesh, this war drama has Malhotra playing a rapist. His character is that of a Pakistani Army officer who is deployed in Dhaka and he decides to rape Bangladeshi women in order to ‘impregnate them with Pakistani children’. In one such sequence, his character rapes Fida (played by Raima Sen).

Malhotra recounts that executing scenes of such an atrocity was not something he was comfortable doing. “I took on a role in this film because it is about history. It is a heart-wrenching tale that saddens you. As a Pakistani army officer, my character kills and rapes at will. I know people will hate me. But doing that role wasn’t easy. I have just tried to do justice to my role. We wanted to show how inhuman humans can be at times,” he says.

Director Devvrat says, “The idea was to repulse the audiences to an extent where they can never forgive such criminals.”