No smoke without study

(Published in Business Standard on April 4, 2015)


I’m feeling very stupid for having quit smoking. A certain kind of pedant would point out that I had five cigarettes on my birthday, four on another random night, and one each on two other evenings; I would point out that that kind of repellent nitpicking personality is just dead weight that nobody wants on a Pictionary team. As far as I’m concerned, I haven’t smoked in about two years.

There’s no doubt that quitting has multiple benefits. I can smell things, though this is a double-edged sword when you live in Delhi. I’m carrying some amount of extra weight, but you can’t really tell it apart from all the other extra weight I was already carrying. My complexion, nurtured on Delhi air, has been upgraded from grey to sallow. My fitness levels are higher. I have more money to spend on booze. But, if BJP MP Dilip Gandhi is to be believed, I totally jumped the gun by not waiting for a properly Indian study on the perils of smoking. Or at least one of which he was aware.

Gandhi is reluctant to plaster graphic warnings all over tobacco products. Packaging cigarettes with grotesque tumours instead of hot cowboys is becoming an international standard because it has been shown to be the most effective deterrent to smoking. But Gandhi says that while everyone knows that smoking is bad for you, there have been no Indian studies confirming the evil link between tobacco and dying, and he needs more time to think about it. We should cut the guy some slack. He’s a patriot, and like all patriots of that kind, probably needs time to use Google, or researchers, or certain virginal tracts of brain.

Actually I don’t feel all that strongly about his dragging his heels on this, only because those warnings never had the slightest impact on me. I have cheerily smoked truckfuls of such packets adorned with any number of gangrenous feet, tumorous faces, or black and shrivelled lungs. I ripped open those packets, god help me, and smoked the lot.

No; obstinate people such as myself will not accept anything other than evidence provided by truly patriotic Indians such as myself. I read reams of material detailing what cigarette smoking does to your body, and merely copyedited them in my head. I watched little signs pop up during movies telling us that smoking is bad for your health, and merely felt annoyed at the intrusion on the screen. I watched ads showing thick black tar being squeezed out of a sponge to illustrate what’s going into your lungs, and that grossed me out a bit.

But what really made me chuck the stuff was a very regular flu, which for some reason felt much worse than any other I’ve ever had, and made me believe that I was on the verge of death. I felt so sick that I didn’t even want to smoke through it; and by the time the illness passed I was already past the discomfort of initial withdrawal. In other words, the self-destructiveness of smoking stops being enjoyable when you actually feel the self-destruction.

Turns out that in the face of many studies (though apparently not enough Indian ones), lots of public service ads and announcements, and an entire Internet filled with revolting pictures of terminal smoking-related illnesses, smoking rates are actually climbing. As far as I can tell, the only foolproof way of getting someone to quit is to let them smoke their lungs out until they feel the cold breath of mortality on the backs of their necks. That’s always robust incentive for a lifestyle change.