Click to play videoIn the run-up to World No-Tobacco Day on May 31, here's our special series on quitting smoking now. On Tuesday, we take a look at hookah bars, and why they're not as innocuous as they seem.
New Delhi: Twenty-year-old management student, Avneesh Chhabra has a shisha at home. While he says he smokes it only occasionally, it's also a social hook.
"The smell of the smoke that comes out is more of the fragrance and unlike smoking it's not very stale and smelly and stinky,” says Avneesh.
His friends often drop by to smoke it and it's not just Avneesh. Drop in at any hookah bar, and you'll find young people like who've literally taken the habit home.
"We bought a hookah from here and not we have at my place. It's like leisure: when you are upset, your hookah is with you,” says a law student, Navneet Anand.
So which hookah would you choose: Orange, strawberry, or mint? But what you'll get with the fruity flavour, is also a hit of tobacco and that's not on the menu.
“The flavour can harm asthmatics, it can harm people who have respiratory illness but tobacco is going to harm the other organ system because there is enough tobacco,” says a senior consultant of Respiratory Medicine, Dr Sanjay Sobti.
The World Health Organisation report of 2006 found that shisha smoke produces harmful carbon monoxide and cancer-causing chemicals.
The charcoal also produces toxins and sharing shishas can lead to hepatitis and tuberculosis.
Here's one more thing to keep in mind: The flavoured molasses used in shishas are burnt using charcoal. The tobacco is burnt at a low temperature and the smoke penetrates deep into the respiratory tract.
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