In the story narrated by you or your story, you are always the lead! The whole story is your point of view!
In the sense of the world if you are wrong then it is the whole world which is wrong while you are just in the wrong place at the wrong time!
Then again, if you are right then you are, well, alone!
The same thing happens in any issue! There is a minimum of two point of view! Sometimes many more! The biggest example is in a family where each of the spouse has a different version of the same story! Or the siblings have a different take on the same ‘fight’!
In the novel “The Clifton Chronicles by Jeffery Archer (the last tolerable Novel by him!)”; the Jeff presents three different versions of the same story!
The start was so good and so complicated! To write three different point of view of the same event or story was nothing short of extraordinary! Of course he could not stick to that line of storytelling and the novel just tumbled down in the series! So much so that I was just waiting for the closure!
But the very fact that a single event can have different interpretation is dependent on an effect called the Rashomon effect!
The “Rashomon effect” refers to the phenomenon where multiple witnesses to the same event provide contradictory accounts, leading to uncertainty about what truly happened.
It’s named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, which explores this concept through the differing narratives of four witnesses to a crime. There have been many movies and stories both from reel and real which have been affected by this affect!
The same incident even in the era of reels and social media everywhere can have different interpretation!
Of course the legal issue is that the Rashomon effect highlights the unreliability of eyewitness testimony due to factors like individual biases, selective memory, and the influence of social and cultural contexts.
In Rashomon, the audience hears four different versions of a murder, each from a different character’s perspective, raising questions about the objectivity of truth.
The term has been adopted in various fields, including law, psychology, and film, to describe the phenomenon of contradictory accounts and the potential for misinterpretations of events.
The Rashomon effect underscores the idea that truth can be subjective and multiple perspectives can exist, even when describing the same event.
In legal settings, the term is used to describe how different witnesses might present conflicting accounts of the same incident, which can make it difficult for jurors to determine the truth!
The effect is not limited to legal issues also! You can have the same effect in day to day interactions and each and every walk of life! A 6 from your point of view is 9 from the other side! So next time you are in a argument you can think either about -(Dash) mon (if you are a mallu!) or Rashomon or padukon! The last one was only to get Prakash Padukone!
Now hopefully all would agree at least in this part of the World that it’s time to sleep!
Shubh ratri!
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