Ash Thursday….Mihir S. Sharma

When US states, beginning with California in 1999, started banning indoor smoking, I began keeping a small if slightly obsessive spreadsheet of the places in the world where I would like to live but couldn’t till I gave up smoking. Ireland, the home of pubs filled with what Seamus Heaney called “gregarious smoke”, became the first entire country to ban indoor smoking in 2004; and as the usual progressive suspects — Norway, New Zealand and the like — started implementing similar restrictions, I began to feel quite unwanted.

It was difficult to avoid the feeling that an era was ending. Ever since Walter Raleigh popularised it in the Elizabethan court — earning for his effort the privilege of being cursed in song by a John Lennon in suffering from cigarette-induced insomnia (“such a stupid git”) — tobacco, like alcohol, has become intertwined with society, with tradition and social ritual. In the dandyish, degenerate Regency period, men duelled over the aesthetics of snuffboxes. The trenches of World War I may have developed superstitions about how many cigarettes you could light with one match. Tobacco has symbolised, at different times and places, friendship, peace, sexual availability, and capitalist greed. Physicians prescribed it for asthma, for ulcers, for all manner of nervous disorders. All popular depictions of FDR featured a shawl across his withered knees, and a cigarette holder held at a jaunty angle in his mouth; a New York Times profile of Kamaraj in the ’60s featured his addiction to Gold Flakes. Queen Victoria detested it, and banned it from royal palaces; Adolf Hitler, a man of slightly larger ambitions, launched massive anti-smoking campaigns, complete with all the bells and whistles his propaganda machine could provide. (Thus, if you are forced, at some point, to call someone turning up their nose at your cigarette a Nazi, it is at least less unfair than when the word is generally thrown about.) And, of course, Gandhiji famously stole money for cigarettes when a teenager.

In a way it is extraordinary that something which has had such awesome cultural impact over centuries should have retreated so swiftly. It had been known since 1828 that nicotine was poisonous; and yet, even after the US surgeon-general released the first official condemnation in 1964, it took a while for anything to happen — till the flurry of bans and prohibitions over the past decade, the blink of an eye in historical time. That might explain the puzzling persistence of enclaves where smoking around others is still considered acceptable. The more conservative — or the more libertarian — areas of America, for example: a map of that country in which counties that have banned smoking are in blue and others are in red will look frighteningly familiar to anyone who’s followed the past couple of presidential elections. It also explains the stunned, vaguely outraged expression on the faces that you will see puffing away on Indian roads. Like an investment-banker demanding a bailout, they never thought the crash would come, at least not in their lifetime.

Unquestionably, something about smoking has turned otherwise liberal people into whole-hearted believers in heavy-handed Government intervention. One would think that government-imposed bans rarely work. Yes, in Scotland, as Dr Ramadoss cheerfully informed us, 45,000 people tried to stop in the months following its smoking ban. Unfortunately, Dr Ramadoss failed to complete the statistic: only 18 per cent of those did so successfully. Well, Dr Ramadoss would say, in the end the ban is to protect non-smokers as well, particularly those whose workplaces are unhealthy cesspools of viciously selfish smokers. Difficult to argue with that; though the definition of “public place” and “workplace” seems so arbitrary. Tellingly, there is no attempt to deal with the fact that in a country where domestic service is still quite common, one person’s home is frequently someone else’s workplace — but servants are invisible in India, so that’s OK.

And government actions always have unintended consequences: in Ireland, it is estimated that over a thousand pubs shut down following the 2004 nationwide ban. The vast majority were in small, isolated hamlets, and, in doing so, they deprived those already-fracturing communities of a vital form of social glue. In New York, midtown pavements began to be unusable for pedestrians when they had to navigate around the entire smoking population of giant skyscrapers. India, in any case, has barely begun to develop a sense of “public place”: a country with the extremes of social and economic inequality that ours possesses has trouble providing places that can be considered both “public” and “secure”. Consider the madness that will result in which genuinely public spaces — pavements, the open road — will

replace supposedly public spaces — malls, say — as a place where smokers will congregate. It is unlikely that the number of places that can genuinely be considered shared will expand. Here, as ever, Central Government diktat is no replacement for local or commercial decision-making — or even for basic courtesy.

An earlier spate of tobacco-related bans — on advertising — is sadly illustrative: Cricket lost Benson and Hedges, tennis Virginia Slims, Nascar RJR and Formula One pretty much everything. Smaller sports were disproportionately affected: international snooker was so badly hit it demanded special treatment. Tobacco’s been so intertwined with modern life that trying to remove it surgically, without some costs, was never an option.

My spreadsheet of places that don’t live and let light is too long to be informative, now. When New York banned smoking in 2003, I told myself that I needn’t worry, I’d give up when Boston did so. Massachusetts banned smoking in 2005; I told myself I’d wait for Delhi — like that would ever happen. After years of smoking in the freezing rain and scalding heat, of choosing friends and favourite places because of tobacco, of restlessness in long movies and interminable night walks looking for open paanwallas, I think Dr Ramadoss has just taken away my last excuse. Thanks, doctor. Thanks a lot.