Sunday, August 25, 2013

Going to watch Madras Cafe movie? Be aware of knew-it-all-along effect!

Spoiler alert!(though Madras Cafe is a historical political thriller)

The protagonist of the movie(John Abraham) is broken down to the brink of insanity because he believes he came so close to saving our ex prime-minister(Rajiv Gandhi) from the assassination attempt but couldn't save him ultimately in spite of several leads and strong evidence that an attempt was going to be made on the prime minister's life! By the end of the movie, in all probability even you, the audience, will be astonished as to how our ex prime-minister could have been assassinated in the face of accurate and overwhelming evidence and will end-up blaming our country's intelligence agencies.

Don't be too hard on the intelligence agencies and neither should the protagonist be too hard on himself. People have a tendency to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place, known as the hindsight bias or knew-it-all-along effect. After an event, people often believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened. Hindsight bias leads John Abraham to believe that he knew all along(on the basis of evidence he collected) that LTTE would try to kill the PM and he should/could have saved him. When presented with the turn of events leading to PM's assassination, audience too feels in the same way as the protagonist.

There could be several reasons why it wouldn't have been so easy to see that prime-minister was going to be assassinated when the events where actually unfolding. The investigation leading to discovery of assassination threat shown in the movie would have been one of several investigations, each spawning several leads. It is impossible to take decisive action on every lead. Or there would have been many false threats of attempt on PM's life which would have fatigued the intelligence agencies. Or, as even the movie shows, the PM's security personnel would have underestimated the seriousness of threat.

So, enjoy the movie and in the back of your mind, know that it wasn't as easy to save our ex-PM as it appears to us on watching Madras Cafe!

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