All Smoke and No Fire!!

Yesterday was an anniversary for me.....well sort of…..I quit Cigarettes exactly 2 years and 6 months ago. In this period I did not smoke about 36600 cigarettes and saved close to USD 4000 on the cigarettes and also about 127 days of my life. I get all this cool info from a neat statistics calculator (installed on my last laptop) which has now ceased to be of any interest to me but for some occasional unexpected surprises like yesterday, when while looking for some files I was prompted that it's actually been 2.5 years that I took a decision that I'm now proud of. And I can say I'm feeling happier, healthier and a tad richer!

And for my super geek friends, another interesting statistic; If the cigarette brand that I used to smoke, has a length of 80 mm and I were to make one big cigarette out of the number that I have not smoked, I would have a cigarette with a length of 2928 meters, roughly 9 times the length of the Eiffel tower or almost 6 times the tallest building in the world, the Taipei 101.....Now that would be one really long stick ;) I also estimate that the amount of nicotine at roughly 10 mg per stick should have generated enough nicotine to at least clog one of my lungs completely!!

There was a period in time where I wouldn’t be seen without a fag in my hands. And anybody who would talk to me about smoking would automatically qualify to be an unsolicited advisor and completely avoidable ;) I've actually thrown out a Mom and daughter duo out of my house a few years back for 'sneaking in behind my back' and 'educating' Anita, my wife, about the ills of smoking and how I was always seen smoking. Well...I would chuck them out again...as their agenda was perhaps more than just to make me quit smoking. God I love myself...for what I did ;) ........and thank the lord Ani saw through their failed effort!

On a serious note, Smoking will kill about a million people in India alone in 2010. It will also earn the government revenues..............obscene revenues! And the explanation that the Government continually dishes out is not only revenue generation but employment potential that the tobacco industry has!

EXTRACT from a Government website (http://dacnet.nic.in/tobacco/handbook/intro.htm):

"India ranks 4th in the total Tobacco consumption in the world. But India's cigarette consumption ranks 11th in the world. Out of the total production, only 19% of the total consumption of Tobacco is in the form of cigarette whereas 81% is in other forms like, chewing, bidi, snuff, Gutkas paste, Jarda, hookah paste etc. The per capita consumption of cigarette in India is one of the lowest in the world in comparison to major Tobacco consuming countries like Zimbabwe, UK, Brazil, U.S.A and Pakistan. The annual level for demand of cigarette in India remains the same at 96 billion sticks as it was 15 years ago, despite the cumulative growth in population by nearly 35 percent during the same period."

Oh Man! I'm so relieved! Our per capita consumption of cigarettes is one of the lowest in the world. I'm thinking if population has anything to do with per capita...Is there even a connection??? Oh! There is??! Really??!!

Just 96 Billion sticks a year...nothing!! Imagine the number of Eiffel towers you could create with 96 Billion sticks!! Honestly, I would like to challenge the fact that the annual level in demand has stayed unchanged for the last 1.5 decades! Excuse me!! I do not buy that….

Meanwhile, cigarette companies will continue to bait youngsters with their subliminal lifestyle messaging and surrogate advertising and will deploy every neuro-marketing trick that will give an inferiority complex to Martin Lindstrom.

Tobacco companies will continue to hide the fact that far from making the young guys masculine their products could make them impotent. Tobacco companies will continue to correlate slimness in girls to smoking...a fact that has no scientific explanation. By sponsoring sports events and creating sports and performance merchandise, the companies may be trying a subliminal association with health and well being, but actually ask a patient who has got Emphysema because of smoking how healthy he feels with each passing day and if he could walk briskly with you for 3 minutes.

These tobacco companies may have launched clothing brands and are actually showing to the world that the division has nothing to do with tobacco and is profitable enough to be a profit center and hence as a enterprise they have every right to make profits by using their brand to peddle anything....Do not mistake...the money they make out of the clothing division is not even a fraction of what the tobacco division makes. Do not mistake it............ this is SURROGATE Advertising...and NOTHING else. A casual observation to even a retail non-expert can show that most of the tobacco clothing brand stores cannot make profits even in the next 10 years. So what brings sustainability into these businesses and why do these companies keep running these stores in high visibility market places which cost the moon and end up losing money???

I think it’s high time we all wake up to this rude reality that WE ARE SIMPLY NOT DOING ENOUGH TO SECURE THE HEALTH AND FUTURE OF OUR NATION!!!!!!!

To curb this smoke we need a lot of fire!!