Good girls don't smoke?

4

Any woman traveling in autos in Delhi will tell you that men around will stare at her, whether they are in cars, on bikes or sitting on a cycle rickshaw. Now if any woman were to light up a cigarette in an auto, it might as well create a traffic jam.

Cigarettes are a serious health issue, but the moment it is a woman smoking, it becomes more than just a health issue. It becomes a yardstick to judge her character, her morality and even a question on her motherhood capabilities. It is of course assumed that every woman will make a mother and every woman wants to.

For long Hindi movies - since one has seen more of those than movies in other regional Indian languages - have shown only bad girls smoking on screen. The gangster's moll (Manisha Koirala, Company), the vamp (Nadira, Shree 420), hookers (Sonam, Mitti Aur Sona) and 'non-Indian' mothers, meaning mothers who wore Western clothes and were against the norm of a good Indian wife or a good Indian mother (Lilette Dubey, Monsoon Wedding). The association has always been clear: Fallen and bad women smoke, good girls don't.

While nicotine harms both men and women - women more because our systems, thanks to the uterus and the estrogen, are more sensitive than a man's - the ISSUE of women and smoking is NEVER just about health. And it's neither recent nor just relegated to India.

Even back in 1922 and in the US, women who smoked were seen as charlatans. New York alderman, Peter McGuinness had this to say, "Young fellows go into our restaurants to find women folks sucking cigarettes. What happens? The young fellows lose all respect for the women, and the next thing you know the young fellows, vampired by these smoking women, desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employers and even commit murder so that they can get money to lavish on these smoking women." (Quoted from Wall Street Journal, Jan 2008)

Smart marketing gave cigarettes an image overhaul from being cancer sticks to being 'torches of freedom': Public relations guru Edward Bernays, dreamed up a campaign where he persuaded a dozen debutantes to light up cigarettes while marching in the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue in 1929 where the attractive young women called their cigarettes "torches of freedom" (courtesy Wall Street Journal, Jan 2008).

Even today many women hold their cigarettes as a symbol of defiance: If a man can, why can't I? Then there is the entire bit about how cigarettes 'help' you retain your figure or get slim. Nicotine kills appetite and many a young thing picks up the habit because she wants to be thin, look good.

Do we blame the girls for wanting to look good? Ad after ad, actress after actress and role-model after role-model perpetuates thin-is-beautiful. And sincerely, no matter how many articles say announce that meat-is-back in fashion, NO woman will buy that.

Then there is the bit about fitting-in. With more women heading out in the corporate world - where a large number of men smoke, particularly in India - women join in the smoking-clan as well. Call it peer pressure, call it looking cool, call it wanting to be fit... Cigarettes are being marketed as much more than another habit to pick up and it's sad.

I have been a smoker and I am trying desperately to kick the habit. My skin has lost its sheen, my hair structure has changed, I don't get a sound sleep because I am coughing into the night and yet I confess, I am paranoid that I will put on weight once I quit. Liberation? I know what it feels to be "fat" (political correctness be damned). But would I rather be plump or dead? I think I have to make that choice. Yesterday, I wrote Smoking is injurious to your character, do read it.

Today, as you read this, I am going to meet a doctor who claims to be able to make me QUIT IN FOUR DAYS. But no matter how good her pointers, I know the honest truth - as a friend of mine pointed out - I have to be ready to give it up. I am. Will share the pointers with you too. Watch this space.

But more than anything else, let's please look at cigarettes for what they are: A suicidal bad habit that lasts a lifetime... Whatever life is left after we get hooked to it and let's try and kick it together. My inspiration is my father, who quit after 32 years of smoking. He didn't want to... Till his nose started bleeding of an internal haemorrhage.

While you mull on that, am going to get ready to meet the doc, see you later.