Tillotama Shome has been a part of some notable web projects, including Delhi Crime 2, The Night Manager, Lust Stories 2 and Kota Factory (season 3). 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 platforms has faded away with time due to the overload of content, and she says, “When freedom comes after a long wait, there’s a sense of overdoing it; people go crazy. I’m 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. The stories will be about the way you say it and the restraint with which you say it,” the actor says. 

Shome asserts that the main players in making a digital project work are the writers, and it’s their uniqueness that’s responsible for the medium’s success. “If we start taking them for granted and go back to devaluing them, we will return to mediocrity,” she insists.

Emphasizing the need to acknowledge the writers, she says, “They gave us the OTT boom. 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; they would get the stories they want, and we would get the stories we want to portray. Everybody will be happy.” 

In her latest web outing, Tribhuvan Mishra CA Topper, Shome plays the part of a woman called Bindi Jain, who goes out of her marriage to look for physical pleasure with a sex worker. The actor found this role “liberating”. “[Most of the time] you don’t realize that 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 I got to play a woman like Bindi and see the other females that inhabit the show, who are unafraid to ask 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.”