Tillotama Shome opens up about teaching theatre to prisoners in US

Mumbai, Sep 5 (IANS) Actress Tillotama Shome, who has been getting a lot of positive response for her work as a serial killer in the recently released second season of ‘Delhi Crime’, has previously taught theatre to prisoners in the US. She talked about what she observed and learnt from those days through art.

Explaining the profile of her assignment back when she worked with convicted criminals with regards to theatre, Tillotama told IANS: “The kind of work I did branched out from something called ‘restorative justice’ where you are interested in understanding what comes after they’ve committed a crime and served their punishment.”

“Once a person is labelled a criminal, they are considered less than humans for society. But the work we did had the potential to bring certain opportunities for those criminals to change.”

She said that everyone has committed some mistakes in their life.

“We all have committed some mistakes and long for a second chance so that we could set things right but life always doesn’t give you a second chance, especially when you are not privileged and don’t have an education,” she said further.

Perhaps, art is something that triggers self-reflection and contemplation.

Opening up on the nature of her “student”, Tillotama added: “A lot of people whom I worked with: I call them my students, they understood the consequences of their actions and were really interested in knowing if there was anything that I could do that would help them deal with situations in a better way.”

The actress opined that the idea of crime, punishment and justice only cater to changing the mindset of criminals and setting an example for the society to look up to what their illegal actions could lead to but, the system on which the society functions remains unaffected largely.

“A criminal will serve the sentence and after that he or she will go out in the world. While they might change, the system doesn’t change; the system that dictates some people have lesser rights when it comes to education or healthcare. Perhaps, that’s the reason a lot of criminals become serial offenders,” she said.

While the idea of crime and its punishment is something that’s really important to society, it has a lot of limitations, “Life is not so black and white. In order to look at crime, one has to look at the nature of punishment,” she concluded.

‘Delhi Crime’ Season 2 is currently available to stream on Netflix. – IANS