Met two of my close clients from Mumbai, Prasanna and Archana today.. they had dropped in to Pune. When I first coached them in 2018 they were based in Riyadh. I had subsequently coached their son Atharva who was working in New York then.

I have coached many couples/ family members in my coaching career, but this trio is the only one I had coached CONCURRENTLY, meaning the coaching sessions for all three were going on simultaneously at different times of the week. In all other cases, it has always been sequential.

Today the three of us had some deep heart to heart conversations and it would be an injustice to not share an unforgettable incident from their coaching (I shared it with them too today).

Sometime during my coaching with them, in one particular week, their son Atharva had come down to Mumbai and there was some fight between the three of them (nothing big.. typical stuff that happens even in your and my homes).

That week I independently had my weekly sessions with all three of them. And in each of the sessions I got to know about that particular fight and guess what.. the way they narrated it.. EACH OF THEM WERE RIGHT FROM THEIR PERSPECTIVE.. by the end of the week I had gotten three totally different versions of the same incident.. and ALL OF THEM WERE CORRECT !

I told Archana today that their fight incident being convincingly narrated to me in three different ways always reminds me of one of the greatest Japanese movies of all time the Oscar award winning movie “Rashomon”, directed in 1950 by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

In Rashomon, four different eyewitnesses provide contradictory accounts of a samurai’s murder, despite all having witnessed the same crime firsthand. The film has also spawned what is known in legal, psychological, and philosophical circles as “The Rashomon effect” to describe multiple witnesses or participants providing plausible but contradictory stories about the same event.

What happened in the Bhandarkar household that day (and happens in yours and mine every other day) is “The Rashomon Effect”. Archana got goosebumps when I told her this. You will too when you watch Rashomon and relate it to your life!