E-Paper
What a drag
We’ll pay for the privilege of killing ourselves. So the more you tax tobacco and the more we remain resolute, the richer you get, writes Soumya Bhattacharya.
Don’t glare at me. Please. Much as I’d love to, I am not smoking as I write this. I am in my office.
I think I can smoke in here. It is an enclosed space and it has, if I open the windows, ventilation; cf: government notification. But my office is part of a larger public place (which is to say, our office) and I am a reprisal-fearing, non-iconoclastic, subservient citizen. So I don’t.
I also don’t smoke in here because I welcome your noble, admirable endeavour to make India smoke-free (apart from the toxins we routinely inhale when we breathe) and to save millions of lives.
Not ours. Theirs, really. Because ‘us’ means smokers — and when I say smokers, I mean I-can’t-do-without-it-ever sort of committed smokers. Them? That’s the rest of the world.
We aren’t actually utter twits, us smokers, though you tend to think we are. I know smoking is bad for me. Well, I know it’s terrible for me. We can agree on that. The trouble is, I am like the Keith Talent character in Martin Amis’s novel, Money: a ‘No Smoking’ sign is the saddest thing I have ever seen in my life.
But let me tell you this: I genuinely resent your patronising attitude. “A defining characteristic of adulthood,” the critic Keith Miller wrote in his review of Smoke: A Global History, “is the ability to consent to things happening to you… Adults, innocent or not, are surely themselves entitled to be protected from infantilisation, something present debates about smoking and public space often fail to take into account.”
If I had a rupee for every occasion when someone looked at me with withering pity and said, “Oh, why don’t you quit? It’s so bad for you, you know,” I wouldn’t need my day job any longer.
Oh, I do know. But I also know that for some of us, this business is less a lifestyle choice than a death wish. What to do? (No, don’t say, “Just quit.” I am beginning to glare.)
I think instead of the famous English playwright, Simon Gray, who, in the grip of cancer, refused to give up. He titled the first volume of his memoirs, The Smoking Diaries; and the last, published days before his death earlier this year, The Last Cigarette.
I think of the great American novelist Richard Yates, who, in his last days in hospital in 1992, would have his daughter remove his oxygen mask to have a few hasty puffs.
And then there is Jean-Paul Sartre, a member of the pantheon of every Bengali boy with pretensions of being an intellectual. (Come to think of it, rare is the Bengali boy of a certain kind who doesn’t aspire to that status. All my copies of Sartre were bought second-hand, so it looks as though I have actually read them.)
Here is Sartre’s lover and fiery feminist Simone de Beauvoir remembering the great man’s commitment to smoking in pop culture theorist Richard Klein’s Cigarettes are Sublime: “Sartre could save his legs only by giving up tobacco. If he did not smoke any more… he could be assured of a quiet old age and a normal death. Otherwise, his toes would have to be cut off, then his feet, then his legs. Sartre seemed impressed. [We] got him home without difficulty. As for the tobacco, he said, he wanted to think it over…”
Think it over? Mmm. It’s just that some of us — and not merely rock musicians, great writers and suicide bombers — have that streak of self-destructiveness. An anti-smoking campaign, of course, works. It has apparently induced 400,000 people to quit in just one year in Britain. (Though to look at the tight knot of people standing outside pubs on a freezing Friday night in London and desperately inhaling, you’d wonder.) The one in New York City has led to the decline in smoking by 21 per cent, and cut teen smoking by half.
The ban over here will, I am sure, bring down the 3,000 deaths that India suffers every day from tobacco use. Our being able to smoke only by the pool when we go to have drinks and dinner at a five-star hotel will allow more Indians to slip quietly into old age and die, er, normal deaths.
It will, most importantly, save them from us.
But nothing, I am afraid, will save us from ourselves. We’ll pay for the privilege of killing ourselves. So the more you tax tobacco and the more we remain resolute, the richer you get. And then on to healthcare, as we spend to keep ourselves alive and smoke some more. We shall puff up your coffers. That’s neat: everybody has his way, and is happy. We are of some use, you see.
And then, in the long run, we shall all be dead. (Apologies to JM Keynes.)
Whose loss would that be?
Now, if you don’t terribly mind, I simply must have a cigarette. Out on the road — which, I am told is not a public space. Stay away if you see the smoke wafting towards you.
