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Blow those smoke rings; Not in my face, please!

Why do people smoke? It makes me unhappy. The question, of course, is rhetorical. One cannot have a rational, scientific answer to a question like that. Science and governments that care for their population have already denounced smoking. Nicotine, the nearly colourless fluid that is extracted from tobacco, is the chief villain along with 399 others in the list of chemical goons who wreck each cell in the smoker’s body providing them the esoteric ‘fix’ with a cigarette.

The ‘new American encyclopaedia’ says: “Its vapour is so irritating that it is difficult to breathe in a room in which a single drop of pure nicotine has been evaporated.” It has an exceedingly acrid, burning taste, even when largely diluted, and it is very irritating to the nostrils. But that is in the pure chemical form. In the marketed form i.e. the cigarette it billows into a clearly visible smoke. And many philosophies have been expounded from its myriad shapes. I am sure we have all heard some of these from some of the ‘of the moment’ philosophers.

Have you seen a smoker closely when he billows out smoke? Although even non-smokers are guilty of exhaling smoke clouds on a particularly cold day, they have a certain playfulness to them that comes from loving life — a ‘joie de vivre’ that is unmistakable and can easily be differentiated from the smokers. There is something about smoke, its floating intangibility and morphing shapes for an imaginative person. There’s mystery and there’s magic in those shapes. There is undeniable pride in creating something and not laying claim to it. Just letting it float and morph into invisibility.

Dreams have meanings, the experts in the field say, and volumes have been written explaining them! Soothsayers find meanings in the dregs of an empty coffee mug and life’s decisions are sometimes made from the wasted remnants of an empty coffee mug. Smoke is full of meaning too. Its fluid form inspires imagination and the dynamic nature leaves little time for debate over the shape.

The cigarette smoker looks intently, furrowing his brows and bringing his eyes closer at the smoke and seems lost in the complexity of the smoke clouds he creates. He looks like he has done a ‘Eureka’! Only has a nicotine be-numbed brain and so mercifully stays put. And the haloed look of deep thought is the one of a private remorse of dying neurons in the brain?

Oh yeah! Most smokers know how damaging the act is to them and to the people around.

Passive smoking is as injurious to health as is active smoking and there is no statutory warning in place there. All smokers carry their own brands of cigarettes, the excuse for that being they like that particular flavour. Discriminating flavours of poison containing the same list of damning 400 odd chemicals! Some brands add a sweetener, some menthol for cooling the effects of the burning inside, cinnamon, cardamom, and whatever have you to mask that odour of the killer chemicals. Discriminating and choosing by elimination is a long tedious process. A friend tried six cigarettes once to finally like the sixth one, to discover later that any of the other brands would have become the preferred brand if only it was tried in the sixth place. But then, she is the one who wants to give up the cigarette. The others are still delusional. Smoking remains a deadly, destructive activity even if you attach creative value to making fancy smoke rings.

Another delusion is that the ‘shisha’ or the hubble-bubble or however else you’d like to call the agent that delivers the nicotine is milder in the killing. Presumably because the filtration process involves water and the presence of water also lowers the temperature at which nicotine is released from the fruit flavoured tobacco. A study from the Virginia commonwealth University found that a session of the fancy hubble-bubble smoking which lasts about 45 minutes, delivers 36 times more tar, 15 times more carbon monoxide, and 70 per cent more nicotine than a single cigarette.

A study in the ‘Journal of Periodontology’ found that ‘hookah’ smokers were five times more likely than non-smokers to have signs of gum disease. An epidemiologist at the American Cancer Society found in a June 2004 study, that men who smoked ‘shishas’ had five times the risk of lung cancer as non-smokers.

The human body is divine! Yeah! In the forgiving act it only equals the divinity. We abuse our body all the time. Eat wrong foods, overeat, undereat, breathe pollution, cause the pollution, punch holes in the ozone layer, and yet live on until one fine day when the internal system just can take it no more, and it strikes back. Some people live a charmed life that defies all logic and sickness, but surely the day of reckoning is just around the corner. Our body is so wonderfully constituted that it can stand a great deal of abuse before it finally succumbs.

‘Nobody pollutes the water of the planet or the air enveloping it’ should be the statutory warning. Wouldn’t poisoning my dinner plate amount to homicide? An average person takes three main meals and breathes in 21,600 times a day. Chew on that, or if you prefer, some smoke rings on that!

Anjana Rajguru is a Dubai-based writer