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Smoking is highly addictive. Don't start. Your doctor or your pharmacist can help you stop smoking. Smoking clogs arteries, heightening the risk of heart disease and stroke. Now guess where you can find these dramatically unambiguous warnings. In Union health minister Anbumani Ramadoss?s G-talk status message? In posters created by his ministry? In the foyer of a cancer clinic? No, these messages encroach on the Marlboro box, almost eating away the logo! The packs, of course, have to be bought in rich countries; the ones sold in India are unblemished by caveats. It is a space that our health minister has not been able to annex yet, but I am going to pray that he does eventually. Ramadoss?s crusade to ban smoking in public spaces coughed into a start on October too, I was among the millions in India who cheered him. I am a non-smoker and I have often been tear-gassed in public by those who struggle to blow out the noxious stuff with feeble help from their rapidly atrophying lungs. But I could not do anything, unless the person who was forcing me to become a passive smoker was three feet shorter than I am and at least 20 kilograms lighter!

So the October 2 ban is a triumph, however small, of reason and reasonableness. But Ramadoss will have to engage in and win more debilitating skirmishes to justify India?s position as a signatory to the World Health Organisation?s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control.

Under the framework, the country will have to display pictorial warnings on tobacco packs by the end of this year. But I don?t see that happening smoothly: 45 cases have been filed against graphic health warnings on tobacco packs, 28 of them in Tamil Nadu.
The tobacco lobby is unnaturally big-muscled in India; although it is pretty powerful in rich countries too, its bullying capacity is not abrasive enough to scrap pictorial warnings. Those of you who follow US presidential campaigns will remember how Bob Dole, one of the Republican hopefuls in 1988, suffered a crushing setback when he casually remarked: ?Smoking is not necessarily addictive?. A warning put up on the Marlboro pack 20 years later emphatically contradicts him!

According to one estimate, one million Indians die every year from tobacco-related diseases, other enumerators think the figure could be much higher.

It is clear that Ramadoss needs citizens? help to curb smoking. Mumbai, the Mecca of Cool can take the lead in lending him a hand. Can one, just one, tony pub in the city ban smoking and thus let out a hint that smoking is uncool? Can one, just one, five-star property in the city eliminate all smoking rooms ? believe me, the occupancy will never be affected. Can one, just one, corporate castle in the city offer the free services of a counsellor and doctor to employees who want to give up smoking? If one, just one, of these things happen, Mumbai will be healthier than ever.
raghu@dnaindia.net