NO MORE SMOKING MY LIFE - Before addiction
A major turn came in my life after I recently developed addiction for smoking. So I need to explain it in a bit more detail, so I thought of posting about it in parts and make it a series.
The first part explains about my point of view towards smoking and smokers before I started smoking.
No one in my family had ever smoked at least since I am seeing them around. It was quite obvious to develop a taboo image about smoking habits based on the family environment. When I was a kid my father used to tell me that when he was a kid and when he asked his dad for a beedi (tobacco rolled in a tobacco leaf, a kind of cigarette) how his dad beat him for that.
With the time I started to learn more about bad effects of smoking and developed even more clear picture about smoking in my mind. More over than just this, smoking seemed to me like a “slow suicide”, committing a suicide is considered as crime in law but this slow suicide is not. Well precisely slow killing is supposed to be a crime but then smoking is an exception.
I guess now it must would have got a bit clear, how much I used to hate smoking.
When I was in 10th standard one of my friend tried making me smoke and told me, one should try everything in his life, at least once. It made quite a sense to me but I was scared of pain in throat I might feel for the first time after smoking. So he told me to just take the smoke in my mouth and release it. I did that, well there was nothing great about it as I wasn’t taking any smoke inside. He asked me to try taking it inside but I refused. Later may be after several weeks I took one cigarette once again but dint take any smoke inside again, so I couldn’t find any fun in doing that so never tried it again. Even being the fact how much I hated smoking the only and the only reason for trying smoking were his words that one should try everything at least once in life.
That was then but now I know that there is no point trying something just for the sake, that others are doing it too.
As far as smokers are concerned, if I was traveling in a three wheeler (a major mode of public commute in Delhi) and if the driver would start smoking then I would ask him throw it away or else I would get down. And not just that I would at least ask the driver a few things like if he is married, if he has any kids and finally tell him to quit smoking. I did used to get very strange response from them but it really dint matter to me anyways.
While in social circle I never used to mind turning my face on other side, taking a step away and sometimes even go away if a person with me would start smoking. I think the reason for this was the mental block I developed within myself about passive smoking and may be the disliking for smoking was getting turned into disliking for smokers as well.
I still remember the evening when I was traveling in a bus and passing by my first company I ever worked with, I saw a very old friend of mine standing in front of the office and in some time I noticed her holding a cigarette burning in her hand and then in a few seconds smoking from it. At first I was shocked and then in next few minutes I changed my point of view for her from a sweet, decent, friendly girl to a BLANK PAGE, I dint know what should I think about it, I never ever thought I would see her like that. We were childhood friends and I had the same impression of the same old friend I had years ago as after we moved to a new house we never met each other again.
The questions that came into my mind was, can anyone get changed so much over a period of time and under any circumstances.
One day I was with a friend of mine sitting at Basant Lok Complex (One of the most high class hang out places in Delhi) out side “Passion My Cup of Tea”, sipping our tea and just opposite to it there is a disco called RPM. There were several girls coming out of the disc and several of them going inside. Most of the girls we could see there were smoking. I asked my friend that what do these girls get out of smoking, then she replied, most of them are not even smoking, if you see carefully then they don’t inhale any smoke and just throw it away as soon as they take it in there mouth.
After that I noticed those girls and I was surprised to see what she said was absolutely correct. Now it was quite clear that its not just the addiction of smoking but addiction for looking cool and addiction for looking part of high class that is adding to the numbers or smoking addicts every day. In fact I guess that the most biggest reason for teenagers getting addicted to smoking is that they find other teenagers who smoke very COOL and tries to become like them!!
Note: I wanted to add few pictures but I am not adding them due to the fact that this page may be accessed by non smokers and in any way I don’t want to promote smoking.
This post is tagged based on the tags for entire series, so few tags may not be relevant for this post.
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