Peene vaalo ko pine ka bahana chahiye (boozers just need an excuse to drink).
So be it in Kolkata where they mostly smoke to smoke out “stress.” Or is it because they have been implored by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to “smoke more to generate additional revenue so that chit fund depositors can be compensated for their losses!”last year in her desperation to make good the losses suffered by the Saradha depositors the Chief Minister had appealed the people to “spend more money on cigarettes” on which she had in fact imposed a levy.
Known for their unflinching faith in Didi the proverbial Dadas (the universal appellation for a Bengali Babu) not only did not grudge the jacked up prices but tended to take Banerjee’s advisory seriously. The apparent upshot: The City of Joy has more number of smokers than any other Indian metro.
In fact a sizeable number of people said they smoke more cigarettes than what they used to a couple of years ago. A recent survey conducted by the ICICI lombard Tobacco Consumption Habits 2014 has found a common smoker in Kolkata puffing 9 or 10 cigarettes a day and burning about Rs1,400 per month. Whereas his Mumbai counterpart is more miserly consuming 6 or 7 cigarettes per day.
The surveyors who questioned 1,111 respondents on an average in cities like Kolkata, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad found about 93 per cent smokers in the City of Joy knew about the bad effects of smoking like cancer and other diseases. They also found that 94 per cent of these respondents did not give “quitting” a try. “It is astounding to know that so many people have not tried to quit smoking for once despite the city has a good awareness level,” said one of the programmers.
Most smokers blame “stress” as reason for smoking, the study says. There are a huge numbers of them however who simply cannot quit. Curiously among those who smoke about 64 per cent do not even have medical insurance.
Historically speaking India has known smoking from at least 2000 BC when people smoked cannabis and its mention was made in the Arthavaveda. While Tobacco in the modern sense of the term came in the 17th century India currently has about 12 crore smokers which constitute about 12 percent of the total number of smokers around the world with an average annual death rate of 900,000 per year.