Actor Tillotama Shome has spoken up about women’s safety, fear and the difficult balance between being alert and simply being able to trust the world around you. She shared an Instagram post amid renewed concerns over women’s safety in Delhi, particularly after the gang rape of a 17-year-old in Aastha Kunj Park near Lady Shri Ram College’s back gate.
Tillotama Shome on women’s safety
For Shome, the conversation appeared to begin with an otherwise ordinary moment in Mumbai. “Yesterday at a traffic light in Juhu, I saw a young girl standing on the footpath, leaning against a metal railing, busy on her phone,” Shome wrote. She noticed that “her body was relaxed and at ease” as men walked past her.
There was no immediate threat. “Some looked at her, just looked at her. Some glances lingered, but there was nothing offensive,” she wrote. Yet Shome found herself getting anxious, caught between two instinctive reactions.
“I wanted to tell her to get off the phone and just be aware,” she admitted. At the same time, she wanted something very different for the girl, “I also wanted her to enjoy the moment of rest and ease. To walk through life with trust.”
When another man walked “very close” to the girl, Shome felt the urge to leave her car and intervene despite acknowledging that “nothing had happened and may never happen”.
“That man just passed, nothing happened,” she wrote, before telling herself, “This is Bombay, relax, relax.”
The reference to Delhi carries another layer. Shome identifies herself as an LSR alumna and recalled, “I used public transport for the 17 years I lived there.” Her reflection comes as current LSR students have been protesting over safety following the Aastha Kunj incident, with students highlighting a 500 metre stretch near the campus that becomes particularly difficult to navigate after dark.
Tillotama Shome on living with fear
“A few nights ago, someone I know was in hospital. I woke up with a nightmare this morning,” she wrote. “Are hospitals safe for us? A sedated woman on a hospital bed, is she safe?” That question also comes against the backdrop of an August case at Civil Hospital in Panipat, where the NHRC took suo motu cognisance of allegations that a 57-year-old woman was raped during a diagnostic test before she died while undergoing treatment.
Shome acknowledges the contradiction at the centre of her thoughts, “But nothing happened.” Yet she adds, “Even when nothing happens here, it happens there, to someone in some part of my country.”
She ends without giving up on that possibility of trust. “We break again and again to come together again and again because we can still hope for an Incredible India,” she wrote. Tillotama Shome was last seen in Sunny Deol‘s Ikka.