Tillotama Shome on 20 years in the charmed world of independent cinema

While the pandemic disrupts the India release of Sir, actor Tillotama Shome talks to Ranjita Ganesan about her twenty years in the charmed world of independent cinema

Two significant things happened in Tillotama Shome’s first year in college. She watched Piyush Mishra’s one-man play, an adaptation of Whatever Happened to Betty Lemon. The performance drew her to the excitement of the stage, so removed from her own existence as a diffident English literature student with a stammer. “I felt a sense of magic, and a sense of distance — that I could never do this.” The same year, she had also encountered a Buddhist idea of the human mind possessing limitless potential, which she was keen on testing before accepting. “So I took on something that I