THOUGHTS ON JIHADS, CIGARETTES AND THE PERFECT PLEASURE.

Baba Ramdev's recent video about starting a "sherbet jihad" against (presumably) the iconic Rooh Afza put me in mind of another jihad that has been raging for some time now but hasn't got the attention it deserves. I refer to the "cigarette jihad" against smokers, which is far more ubiquitous than the other jihads: the latter are limited in scope, applicable only to members of certain religions, but the cigarette jihad applies across the board to everyone who smokes, irrespective of his or her religion, and is a shocking display of secularism, in my view.

No one but a smoker understands fully the import of the saying: you can run but you can't hide; for a smoker today there's no place to hide (and have a quiet puff)- he is banished from restaurants, cinema halls, buses and metros, drawing rooms, planes and airports, and even in his own castle he has to take refuge in either a toilet or a balcony. His social status is lower than that of a Punjabi or Gujarati immigrant in Trump's America. Doctors talk down to him, Finance Ministers treat him like a milch cow, hotels consign him to non-smoking rooms without any room service, airport managers shove him into smoking cubicles resembling tandoors, socialites turn up their rump at him with a flounce, pretty girls refuse to share their mobile numbers with him. In Washington for a World Bank meeting, I had to go down thirty floors, out in the freezing cold, every time I wished to have a cigarette. Cadging a few million dollars from the Bank certainly wasn't worth the effort. But it wasn't always so for people of my generation.

I started smoking in my first year in college and have not looked back since, except to recollect, with a touch of nostalgia, the good days we have left behind. Those were the days of Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart who always spoke through a cloud of smoke. One could smoke anywhere then- with a cup of coffee at Trinca's on Park Steet watching the non-pareil Usha Uthap belting out "Ramba ho", or in the AC coach of the the Vestibule train while travelling home to Kanpur from Calcutta, or while watching a movie in the Rivoli in Connaught Place. Till the early 1990s I distinctly remember being allowed to smoke even on international flights, occasionally even being gifted a couple of packs of Marlboros by an air hostess impressed with my diplomatic passport! (In those days wrestling federation chiefs didn't get these maroon passports!). Girls didn't exactly swoon over us (that was reserved for the leftists) but they did occasionally cuddle up for a second hand whiff and that was, as Omar Khayyam would have no doubt said, "Heaven enow." Why, one could even light up during job interviews: I remember being interviewed by the Director Personnel of SBI in the Parliament Street office in 1973 for the job of a Probationary Officer. I lit up while waiting for my turn in the ante-room; when I was called I walked in with my cigarette, waste not, want not being my creed. I didn't get the job, of course, but not because of the lighted fag: I suspect it had something to do with my answer to the Director's question: "Where do you see yourself five years from now in this Bank?" In hindsight, my answer was perhaps too cocky: "In your chair, sir." I have since learned that honesty is never the best policy at job interviews.

All pretty tragic, considering the benefits of smoking, both to the individual and to society. Non-smokers are not aware of what they are missing. Cigarettes are the food for broken souls. You can't buy happiness but anyone can buy cigarettes, and that comes pretty close. Oscar Wilde famously said that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?" Groucho Marx went a step further when he stated that, given the choice between a woman and a cigar, he would always choose the cigar. At the age of 74, I see the wisdom in what he said: it's easier now to light up a cigarette than a woman. There are other benefits too: smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying, and therefore it obviates the need for having to save up for your old age!

One final thought before I part with you, dear reader. Cigarettes, or at least the buying of them, is a very accurate indicator of inflation and rising costs of living, certainly much better than the consumption "basket" govt. economists are talking about all the time. This basket, of course, is rigged like a casino and contains only what suits the govt. But a smoker never lies. Let me illustrate my point.

I started my smoking career in the early 70's with the humble "beedi" (which cost about 25 paise for a pack of ten) since my Dad gave me a pocket money of Rs.10/- per month only and was a more difficult negotiator than Donald Trump. In the fullness of time, as domestic income rose, one progressed up the carcinogenic scale  to Wills Flake, Wills  Navy Cut, Gold Flake and India Kings. The apotheosis was attained when, after the generosity of the Sixth Pay Commission, one touched the sublime heights of Classics and Marlboro. Sadly, that didn't last long though with the arrival of Ms Sitharaman, Hardeep Singh Puri and Mr. Gadkari. So, like an Everest summiteer, one descended back the way one had come- a brand notch lower with the filing of each successive ITR. I am back to Wills Flakes these days, and desperately trying to keep the "beedis" at bay.

This bit of history is prime raw material for economists, who rarely trust cooked-up govt. figures to determine inflation rates, and look for secondary indicators: household savings, number of cars bought, power consumption, real estate prices, and so on. They also rely on some rather odd if not weird indicators. Alan Greenspan, the then Federal Reserve Chairman, invented the Underwear Index to gauge consumer sentiments and economic cycles- his theory was that in a downturn people bought fewer underwears! A more recent one has been reported by the Wall Street Journal: the Home Lunch indicator. It says that when more people bring lunch from home instead of eating in the cafeteria or a restaurant, that indicates a tightening of the budget belt and increase in cost of living. Visits to brothels and night clubs is another indicator- in an economic downturn they decline significantly!

This is precisely where the cigarette comes in handy as an economic indicator : a shift in the brand one smokes is a faithful index of the cost of living. The government should include it in their inflation basket. As for me, I'm desperately trying to reduce my daily intake of the cancer sticks but it's a losing battle, methinks, especially with pensioners likely to be denied the benefits of the 8th Pay Commission. As the gay smoker, who was trying to quit, confided in his friend: I'm down to two butts a day.