Lighters Up, Guns Down

Two days before World No Tobacco Day, a new campaign raises impotency as a weapon against smoking

Lighters Up, Guns Down

Two days before World No Tobacco Day, a new campaign raises impotency as a weapon against smoking

They talked lifespan; it failed. They talked cancer; ditto. Now, they're talking sex, and predictably, everyone's all ears.

The Heart Care Foundation of India and Department of Health and Family Welfare (Government of Delhi), in association with the Indian Medical Association, yesterday launched an anti-smoking campaign with impotency as the underlined risk.

"People don't pay attention when we tell them about cancer, because they know it'll take them 20 years to get there," explained Dr KK Aggarwal, president, Heart Care Foundation of India.
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Danseuse Shovana Narayan stood in support of the new drive, though former Union Health Minister Ambumani Ramadoss and other health officials were nowhere in the picture.

"If awareness about this threat was brought about before anything else, the damage that smoking has caused could've been curbed long back," Shovana said.

The crusade, controversial as it may sound, is already a hit in the West, and has already garnered a Web click count of around 500, just hours within its launch. Sex, after all, is a dear occupation.
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A half-smoked cigarette arched to look like a limp penis endorses the campaign poster with a message that reads how blood flow to key parts of the body is reduced as a result of this vice.

But it's not just young men who're being dissuaded with a glamorous message. For women, it's warnings of early wrinkling that are playing dissuader.
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But the evil, say the propagators, is strictly the tobacco, not smoking as such. "In its truest form, smoking has a therapeutic effect.
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Half a century back, Ayurvedic herb smoke healed generations. But somewhere, tobacco seeped in, and hasn't stopped victimising people ever since.
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I'm not sure if Sharad Pawar was one of them, but if he was a sufferer, he should have stood up for the cause," said Aggarwal, narrating how the practice slowly penetrated the society, and its effects spread to the top rung of the country's administrative circle, too.

"Whether it's a paan masala or a cigar, it's as dangerous, no matter how stylish," seconded Shovana Narayan animatedly.
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But, a sexed up campaign against failure of performance, they feel, can make a huge difference over plain, paltry fining. Did we just hear doing it stylishly doesn't matter?