Jawed Khurshid

 

Outside a crowded bus stop at Saki Naka, the hub of service industries, 24-year-old Gaurav Deshmukh was puffing on a cigarette, sharing it with his svelte diva Kajal Sharma, who was sitting beside him.

 

‘Cigarettes aren’t that harmful, the drugs surely are,’ Deshmukh pontificated, when asked about its ruinous impact on health. 

 

When reminded about a law that bars people to smoke at public places and imposes financial penalty and even incarceration in certain exceptional cases, the outspoken call centre executive said, ‘There are gluts of laws that have made our lives miserable.’ 

 

‘Life is short and one must live it king-size. Society derives sadistic pleasure in chaining our desire,’ Deshmukh lectured.

 

Savita, a housewife, has been smoking since past two decades. She is among the many women who have taken to cigarettes in a big way. The last decade witnessed sharp rise in the number of smokers. 

 

Whether her hubby hasn’t objected to this? ‘Yes initially he did and many a times there used to be heated arguments that at times bordered on nasty fight, but ultimately he got accustomed to this,’ she said. 

 

Like Savita there are many in the city who are used to smoking. They picked up the habit for different reasons. Some do it out of loneliness, some because of peer pressure. Haseena Khan, a member of Awaz-e-Niswaan, an organisation that works for women’s rights, says she knows of cases where men have persuaded their wives to take up smoking in a bid to improve their sex lives

 

Cigarettes smoking at times stir up desire to go in for drug abuse too. ‘Pathetically most people even took to drugs via the most common but underestimated gateway — cigarettes. And the irony is that like most addicts, a person never thinks he got hooked,’ informed a prominent psychiatrist of the city. 

 

Psychiatrists warn of its disastrous effects. Smoking in the long run produces damage that is hard to reverse. While physicians preach abstinence from smoking, it is strictly a no-no for people with family history of hypertension and atherosclerosis.