Tillotama Shome has been a part of some impactful OTT projects including Delhi Crime 2, The Night Manager, Lust Stories (2023) and more recently Kota Factory and the recent Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper. Even with such projects to her credit, the actor calls herself a “late bloomer” on the medium.
Ask her if she feels the excitement of the OTT medium has faded away with time due to the overload of content on it, and she says, “When I am asked such questions about my own industry, I have to say it with a pinch of self-reflectiveness as I am a part of it. I can’t point fingers at others. Like any other freedom when it comes, if it comes after a long wait, there’s a sense of overdoing it. People go crazy because you have suppressed that for so long. I am a part of the problem, so I will hopefully be a part of the solution as well. It’s going to be an ongoing process.”
However, the 45-year-old believes that there will be a point of balance in the future. “There will be a state of equilibrium at some point where it won’t be enough to just say anything, just because you can say it. It will be about the way you say it and the restraint with which you say it. What we enjoy so much (on OTT) has come out of a certain lack,” she says.
Shome asserts that the main players in making a project work on OTT are the writers, and it’s their uniqueness that has been making the medium a success. “But if we start taking them for granted and go back to devaluing them, we will go back to mediocrity,” she insists, adding, “Our writers gave us this OTT boon, but it will die like anything if we don’t give them enough credit. It’s like anything that goes up must come down. In order to sustain a higher ‘ask for more’, we will have to give the writers more. Otherwise, we will get stuck in another trench. Imagine if media houses wanted to talk to writers and creators, how much more negotiation power they would have. Then the media will get the stories they want, and we will get the stories we want to portray. Everybody will be happy.”
In Tribhuvan Mishra: CA Topper, Shome plays a part of a woman who goes out of her marriage to look for physical pleasure with a sex worker. She insists that playing this role was “liberating” for her. “The thing is that you don’t realise you are imprisoned. It’s like staying next to the smell of piss, you get used to it after some time. When it comes to the loss of personal freedom, you don’t even know when you’ve lost it, when you’ve started giving away bits of it, even when no one is asking for it,” she shares, adding, “When you get to play a woman like Bindi Jain and see the women that inhabit the show, who are unafraid to ask for pleasure and pay for pleasure, it was like coming out of a closet that we have created on our own, for just being flesh and blood.”
