No acrid smoke for me

An ex-smoker wonders if he should thank Ramadoss for the smoking ban

Last week, Pankaj Udhas was in town and this reminded me of a line from one of his songs that people used to use to describe me u00a0'Jis raste se tu guzre woh duwon se bhar jaaye' (the road you take is filled with smoke.)

And since I smoked a foul pipe I'm a long-time fan of Sherlock Holmes my friends in Delhi used to just look for ash to see if I was around!

But all good things come to an end and to every night there's a dawn. After I quit smoking, I found that it had some benefits. My appreciation of the taste of food went up as did the circumference of my midriff because I was eating more and more. In fact, I found to my embarrassment that when I did pushups, my belly touched the floor before my chest.

But all in all, the abstinence has been worth it. Some people say that it would have been far better had I never smoked, but quitting smoking is far better than having never smoked at all it shows you that you have willpower, and this is commendable because some people say that nicotine is far more addictive than heroin.

Having quit in March 2008, I don't know what to say of the smoking ban, which came over six months after I turned non-smoker. If I was still a smoker, what would I have done? Would Ramadoss's diktat have converted me into a non-smoker? Doubtful after all, people quit because of a variety of reasons health, social stigma, boredom from having smoked too much for too long, or because your wife has decided to shoot you dead if you smoke again but people don't quit because a health minister decides to impose a ban.

The main reason why people start smoking is because it is perceived as cool and the best way to get people to quit is to make it seem uncool. And let's face it, the discomfort apart, if any government tells you not to do it, then it becomes cool to do it. So, while the ban may make it good for non-smokers and also prove irritating for smokers, its ability to cause people to quit is questionable.

I can go on and on, but our graphics designer has just come back from a smoking break, so let me stop now and pass on the story to him so that he can lay it out on the page.