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Sourish Bhattacharyya
I still remember the excitement I felt when I first met you at a pollution check camp on World Environment Day a little over two years ago. You had just flown in from San Francisco, so, naturally, I inquired whether you felt jetlagged. In your inimitable style, you replied, and I reported it in the next day's newspaper: ``The moment I stepped out of the airport, I breathed in the air and it hurt my eyes started burning. So, I told myself I must make it a point to be here, jetlag or no jetlag.'' I couldn't help not being a cynical hack and admiring your spirit.
Last weekend, I met you a couple of times, first in a television commercial, and then in a newspaper ad, for a brand of chewing tobacco. Suddenly, I wasn't as starry-eyed as I was on that World Environment Day. As a citizen, as a father of a child who's a potential target of ads such as the ones where you appeared, I was shocked to find my favourite ustad hawking a class of products linked to 30-40 percent of all cancers among Indian men.I can understand the advertiser's logic. The tobacco market, whether for chewing tobacco or for cigarettes, is perpetually in a self-destruct mode -- being a risk factor for 25 chronic diseases with fatal consequences, tobacco keeps killing its users much before their time. Medical statisticians say a male smoker is likely to get a heart attack 7-9 years before a non-smoker; in the case of women, the gap is 16-19 years, which means pre-menopausal female smokers forfeit the biological advantage their hormones provide them against heart attacks. The World Health Organisation (WHO), meanwhile, reports that tobacco use killed 129,000 Indians in 1990 and condemned 353,000 of us to a life of disability.
For the producers it means constant pressure to replenish the market, which is why they need role models like you (or our charismatic cricketers who sport the Wills logo) to endorse their message that tobacco is safe, that it is used by successful people. What they don't say is that WHO has identified India and China as the new epicentres of the emerging tobacco epidemic. That 1.5 million Indians are likely to die from tobacco use in the year 2020, while another 5.8 million of us will be living with a death warrant. Do you want to be part of this assembly line of lies? Do you want to strengthen, to quote the words of WHO, ``the powerful alliance of tobacco companies and agricultural interests'' working against the health sector's efforts to reduce tobacco use?
Yes, the health sector is fighting the looming epidemic with its back to the wall and its hands tied. Recently, it was reported that the government had cleared ITC's proposal to treble the capacity of its Kidderpore factory. Soon thereafter, the news came of New Delhi allowing up to 100 percent foreign direct investment in cigarette units. Global tobacco majors aren't eyeing developing nations like India without reason their presence in the West is shrinking rapidly, thanks to health activists, so they have to save their skins by the tapping new markets. It reminds me of how British merchant capitalists introduced opium into China, with Parsi merchants being the good parvenus, to underwrite their tea trade. Replace opium with tobacco (WHO, incidentally, regards it as a narcotic substance) and the tea trade with the interests of shareholders of global players like Phillip Morris, and you have a modern-day version of the farce played out in China in the middle of the last century by the likes of JardineMatheson.
Consider for a moment what's happening in America. Not so long ago, when Winona Ryder appeared in too many films with a cigarette in hand, activists kicked up so much dust that she had to kick the habit -- at least on screen. Those concerned about America's health had argued that Ryder, being a young people's icon, shouldn't be seen promoting a life-threatening habit. The smoke signals cannot be any clearer. In the land of the Marlboro Man, who, incidentally, died of lung cancer, celebrity endorsement of tobacco products is increasingly being viewed as a dirty business.
That should give you something more substantial than tobacco to chew on. And here's another bit of information to keep you chewing. The authors of the epoch-making study Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Cancer, which was released in New Delhi by the internationally acclaimed nutritionist C. Gopalan last year, were emphatic in stating that we just have to stop using tobacco and shift to the right kind of diet to prevent 30-40 percent of all cancers. It takes so little to prevent a disease that adds 700,000 new patients to India's chronically ill population every year, yet we're so reluctant to do so. It may be sobering to recall that the authors of the report and they represent the best brains in cancer research the world over have estimated the cost of treating a cancer in the developing world to be six times more than that in a developed country, simply because health and insurance services there are geared towards coping with the disease.
I can't help remembering the opening lines of Wag the Dog: ``Why does the dog wag its tail? Because the dog is smarter. Had the tail been smarter, it would have wagged the dog.'' Are we going to let ourselves be wagged by the tail, and keep chasing it round and round in circles? Or are we going to be smart enough to say `no' when it's still not too late? As my role model, you've got to show the way, and I'll be the first to say, ``Wah, ustad!''
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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This story was printed from Net Express located at http://www.expressindia.com. Net Express provides a portal to India, with news from The Indian Express and The Financial Express along with sites on travel and tourism, the entertainment industry, the power sector, the environment and much more.
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