It is the oldest trick in the world.
It is called diminishing by an unfair but convincing comparison. We do it all the time. And for some reason, it is quite the established and accepted ritual.
Think back. Did you as a child push unpalatable food down your throat with a parent delivering statistics on how many children are starving in Ethiopia?
My grandmother had a way of keeping us obsessively busy dusting, with tales of how much harder it was to plaster their village homes by hand with wet mud!
Who has not had a teacher extol their great fortune in being able to attend a boring class while there are kids struggling to read under the street lamps?
Politicians make a habit of trivializing their own  failures by pointing at  dismal records of other leaders.
Mum-in-laws will often negate the hardships faced by their son’s wives  considering  how many sacrifices they made in their time.

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Without going into their veracity, it can be safely assumed that none of these statements represent any desire on the part of the speaker to acknowledge the discomfort of the subject in question. The unstated objective of this craft is to dodge responsibility. And  to keep things conveniently at a status quo. It suits someone to avoid deeper engagement  with an inconvenient truth by harping on a worse scenario.

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There is the proverbial saying about being sad over having no shoes until one met another who had no feet. But has the disabled person in this story ever had a chance to offer his side of the story instead of being an object of pity? A hugely unfair and universal presumption is generally made about his life being of lesser value because he has stubs where there should have been feet.  The moral of the story should have been that the poor fellow badly needed a pair of shoes and someone ought to donate a pair; instead it became all about his need not being as important because there was someone who did not have feet to begin with. Do you see the fault line in this brand of logic?
I firmly believe we would build a happier, safer, more sustainable world if we did not dodge real issues in this cowardly manner.  But switch on the TV, open the day’s newspaper or go online, and the gas lighting is in full flow.
You begin a discussion on euthanasia related legislation and a smart deflector will condemn the elitist nature of the issue, because the poor do not have access to healthcare.

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The alarmingly consistent stories on rape in Haryana led the Khap Panchayats recently to demand early marriage! A debate on abortion will habitually degenerate into a question of morality; is it fair to punish the unborn child?
The latest victim of this is Jairam Ramesh, India’s Rural Development Minister. His declaration of toilets being far more needed than temples in the country has unleashed a storm of hurt religious sentiments. How dare he compare oranges with apples! Well, NASA researcher Scott Sandford, dried, ground and spectrometered both apples and oranges and found them to be remarkably similar. Which is to say that the apples and oranges cannot be compared premise falls by the wayside, nice and proper.

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Honesty would lie in pointing out the omissions in one’s opponent’s logic and facts.  We instead change the subject, quote irrelevant facts, and are intellectually dishonest. Under layers of obfuscation.

The author is a Resource Center-in-charge at the Junior Wing of Air Force Bal Bharati School. A teacher with a background and training in media, she has worked in advertising, public relations, documentary film making and feature journalism. Her interest lies in the role of motivation, an all-round exposure and multiculturalism in education. A regular contributor to the ‘Teacher Plus” magazine and a blogger with a keen interest in the evolving social dynamics and their influence on young people, she maintains a blog at http://confessionsofanambitiousmother.blogspot.in/