The state’s shadow on my lungs

Being a smoker has never been this hard. Added to the headache of hefty tax deductions and looming appraisals, I also have to counter my sheepish cigarette vendor who is charging me an extra Rs10 for 20 Classic Milds. A pack, which until yesterday, cost Rs110. Though it might not be reflected on the packet’s MRP, there has been a hike announced in the budget. I can’t help but feel stupid. I understand the logic of the government - if he is stupid enough to kill himself of his own volition, let’s milk him to his death. But even here there’s a moral catch. The young must be saved, or so the slogan for a prohibitive price rise often reads. But if some of its members were indeed young, the government may have figured that the more expensive a commodity, the more dire the need to claim it. All that a hike leads to is a frown, and in my case, a grimace.

It is perhaps important for me to point out that this article does not seek to be a diatribe, nor does it mean to be a defence of smoking, a habit that we all can agree must be condemned more than condoned. But what this article does seek to do is ask a few moral questions. In a time that the state seems to have taken its daggers out against the smoker, whatever happens to her personal rights of freedom? More importantly, have we finally shifted to a time when a smoker can perhaps enjoy every other right in the constitution except his one coveted right to smoke?

A few months after I moved to Mumbai in January last year, I was told that it would now be illegal for me to smoke in a taxi. An NGO that calls itself Action Campaign against Tobacco had tied up with the Maharashtra Motor Vehicles Department to levy a Rs 300 fine for those who’d be caught taking a stolen puff. Taxi drivers have since implicitly allowed their passengers to light up on roads where they felt nobody would look, but as one of them informed me, the task isn’t without peril. “There are times when I feel like I am taking my girl-friend out for a drive, and every hawaldar is her father.” The one other question that I have also had some of these passive smokers ask is, “What you do here shouldn’t matter to anyone else. Should it?”

The question would perhaps carry significance in a world of yesteryear, when one did not need an imposition of law to mark everyday exchange, and more tellingly, a world in which erratic garbage disposal was preferred over a lack of litter. I recently found myself standing outside a mall, taking quick drags of what I knew was my last cigarette. A man gazed at me intently, and just as I had butted the stub on the pavement, he swooped upon me to demand Rs300. I asked him for his identification, and all he had to show me was a Brihan Mumbai Corporation receipt that could quite easily have been printed clandestinely. As I showed resistance, he was joined by another of his colleagues; this one was burlier than him. I had little escape, but decided to pay up on just the one condition. He would have to explain why he didn’t warn me to not throw the remains of my cigarette on the pavement. An act he could have quite easily predicted. The answer was sharp. “That isn’t a part of my job. Besides, if I had, how would I ever get my commission?”

It is, of course, well within the jurisdiction of the state to think about the mortality and health of its subjects, especially in a time when nearly one out of every five tobacco-related deaths amongst Indian men is related to the smoking of cigarettes. But what I find curious is the mechanisms that are being put in place as tools of dissuasion. Each time you think of lighting a cigarette, the hope is that you will be looking for a man in uniform who is out to empty your wallet. Patronisingly perhaps, it has been decided that it is shrewd materialism and not a corrective resolve that will save the day. It is precisely this invented order of compensation and over-compensation that I rebelled against recently when I found myself standing outside the same mall again. I lit up. I knew I was testing fate. But I am a smoker, remember? I do that well.

Shreevatsa Nevatia writes at DNA for a living. He may not be wise but he is a lover of wisdom