The Knotty Naughty comparison

Even a casual announcement of the result of a neighborhood child (He came first in his class!), evokes a burst of protest from own child “Please don’t EVER compare me with others!”…. This is a ‘preemptive strike’.

“She is so beautiful…” invokes a retort “which means to indirectly point out that I am ugly”.

“He is a very efficient worker”…. “which means, my case is closed, for a pay hike/ request-transfer/ promotion/etc”.

We know how safe it is to preserve the lavish praises till the obituaries! Even a mother-in-law qualifies!

Even a remote similarity or a coincidental reference to anything that comes any where near a “comparison” sparks that intolerance within those people, who balance their emotion with a heavy load of ‘trust-deficit’. Yeah! That is the ‘catch-word’ now… ‘Trust-deficit’. As long as we are willing to succumb, the media would commercialize any emotion, and dump us into an abyss of emotional deficiency, we would notice it too late, being so well addicted to ‘deficit-financing’ at all levels, starting from small nuclei-family to Union of States!

Intolerance is just the other side of the coin that is not shown publicly quite often, but invariably ends up into jealousy.

What to do about this naughty problem of ‘comparison’ which makes it more knotty, whether we loosen it or whether we tighten it? Yes! We can’t do away with it too, the ‘comparison’. We feel great comfort, when the doctor says, “compared to yesterday, my patient, your dear close relative, is far better today, and I am quite confident now that I can save his life, and he would survive, and even become completely normal” (majority of the words are results of comparison—my patient, your dear/close, life-saved-not lost, normal-below-normal, etc.

It is so simple that we would not even reach home after work, if we fail to compare the image of the correct route from our memory, while we look out and choose the roads, the turns, the land-marks, on our way back (reminded of dementia, eh?). How miserable we feel, when a very close person fails to remember us, and respond, just because our face, voice, image, etc bears no resemblance to what is stored in that person’s memory due to the long gap of time! Even the stupid computer needs at least one common ‘comparable’ data field, to match and then co-relate the additional inputs to the ‘base’. So, our memory too has its data as a ‘base’ which is quite bas-ic to know anything further, knowledge is from ‘known-to-unknown’ a process of compare-contrast(At school, these ‘compare and contrast’ questions were quite easy and almost like a life saving drug to fetch some marks at least, when we fell short of our target-scores!).

It is the wrong comparison of priorities that lands us in needless deep trouble (Oh! Had I not insisted on yielding to that stupid itch for a cup of coffee, I would not have missed the last bus! Anyway that cup of coffee was insipid too!).

This ‘comparison’ is a weapon that fires both ways, and always. The solution is not a one-time-patch, but essentially the periodic and regular cleansing of ourselves of that negative emotion called jealousy (which can also be referred to by a more easily acceptable name, intolerance), on an ongoing basis. This would give us the freedom to liberally extend our trust to others, whereby they can choose to freely give their opinion, and then, we have the choice to see how their intelligence ‘compares’ with the requirement of the situation, about which they opine, and also how other relevancy-parameters compare with priorities of the situation, effortlessly superseding our own highly-subjective-oriented negative tendencies (polarizations, to be more precise).

With commendably comparable regards,
Psn(19th June, 2010)