Nauseating is what I call it.
Consider: about 890,000 people all over the world die every year from inhaling secondhand smoke (World Health Organization figure). Who are these people? They are the subjugated non-chimneys of society. They die because most of them live in abject submission to the poison-emitting chimneys.
Every year, tobacco smoke kills more than seven million people in the world. More than six million out of those are the smokers (WHO). How many more, non-smokers, suffer due to this pollution of the environment but recover after painful medical treatment? They are not counted.
Social trends play a very important role in this catastrophe. Smokers are facilitated and protected by society. Social norms are such that a person who is a non-smoker does not stop a smoker from lighting up a cigarette in their company - all in the name of “good manners”. At times, I wonder if the non-smokers have some sort of inferiority complex: they will put their own lives and the lives of their children at risk but will not ask the smoker to refrain in their presence or inside their homes. Why would they take such a chance with their own lives and those of their loved ones? You see, that’s the norm in society!
Why has society placed smokers on a high pedestal? To find answers, I suggest that we go back in history and look at the origins of smoking cigarettes in our culture.
The modern cigarette was brought into our culture by Western colonial and other related influences. Today, smoking in public has also to do with imposing a particular kind of patriarchy. Although women in the Indian Subcontinent were regularly smoking the traditional hookah along with men, women in the West were not “allowed” to smoke cigarettes. So the patriarchal restriction has a peculiarly Western touch to it – all the more ironic since it is today enforced more rigidly by our society than in the West!
The industrial revolution had brought new money and new trends. The tentacles of the tobacco industry reached the Indian Subcontinent - to a society engaged in agitation against colonialism but still still eager to embrace all things Western in the garb of modernity.
In our society, smoking cigarettes emerged as a sign of a modern person, who had shed the old traditional hookah or the indigenous leaf-rolled biri. The modern man, rejecting the old Eastern headgear, now donning a Western style hat, stepping out in society in Western clothing, listening to Western music, also had a cigarette hanging from his mouth. Oblivious of the harmful effects of smoking, he was allowed to smoke as much as he wanted by the society. This was a society still beholden to Victorian values. Women had smoked hookah in the past, but now after colonization, women who smoked cigarettes were frowned upon. Smoking developed deep roots in society. From urban centres it traveled to the villages and hamlets. In the developed world, the increasingly rich tobacco industry gained more power and its tentacles reached the most obscure places of power. Although scientific research eventually started cautioning public on the damaging effects of smoking, nobody gave much attention to it as cigarette advertising became more robust. In Hollywood movies and Bollywood songs, every hero had a hat on his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The imagination of the men of the 20th century was captured by cigarettes. Debonair and smoker went hand in hand.
Now in the 21st century, equipped with more research on the harrowing effects of smoking, and more tools of information dissemination, medical science very clearly and visibly prohibits people from smoking. Governments and societies in the Western world have woken up to the detrimental effects of cigarette smoke. But in Pakistan , some people have actually missed the bus and still live in the early 1900s.
In the urban centers in Pakistan, most smokers would know the injurious effects of smoking cigarettes – not only on their own health but to others. One wonders if they simply do not care.
And what about the non-smokers in our society? Are they, too, as oblivious as the smokers are of the harmful effects of second-hand smoke? Or are they just shy and at some deep level of psychology lack the courage to stand up to a “modern and Westernized” person?
But aside from a subconscious inferiority complex towards anything Western, as mentioned earlier, I would argue that gender plays a huge role too. Today in Pakistan, the smokers are overwhelmingly men. The concessions that society offers to them are clearly based on the fact that rules and laws are made by men. And so are the social norms. Technically, for instance, government offices and other buildings by law are smoke-free zones. But the law is hardly followed or implemented by men. It is very interesting to note how men from different strata of society and with varying levels of education behave in the same way when it comes to smoking.
I was just recently subjected to the attitude of Pakistani public smokers recently, while eating out. With their devil-may-care attitude, they were puffing away non-stop whilst others struggled to eat their dinner. The foul smell, the nauseating smoke all around, even in the open, was enough to spoil the evening for the non-smokers – regardless of where they were seated.
While most of the smokers’ tables had male smokers puffing away, one table with two female smokers made for a particularly interesting contrast. The two women, when they wanted to smoke, got up from their table and walked far away from the other diners. They smoked their cigarettes on the far end of the outdoor dining area and came back to their table only when finished.
For me, what put these two women apart from the male smokers was that they were conscious of the fact that polluting the environment was not welcomed by non-smokers. Contrary to this sensitive behaviour of the two women, the men, usually the only gender smoking anywhere, always feel entitled to pollute the air.
A very interesting thought experiment would be: what if it were the other way around? What if the overwhelming majority of the smokers in Pakistan were women? Would the law allow them to blatantly pollute the environment in public spaces? Would men silently watch and surrender to suffering?
I argue that societal trends need to change and smokers – particularly the more insensitive ones – perhaps ought to be shunned from polite company. Non-smokers would have to assert themselves against this injustice and demand a smoke-free environment. And this cannot simply be demanded from the government, the law or from rights groups – but simply from the smoker in your company.
Consider tell them you don’t want to inhale their filthy smoke.