Say no, minister

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss certainly has energy. Even as he obsessively watches every Shah Rukh Khan movie where the actor lights a cigarette or grabs a drink, he also slams the IPL for including Vijay Mallya’s Royal Challengers team that subliminally manipulates us into self-destructive alcoholism. Saif Ali Khan was scolded for eating and endorsing chips that supposedly got him close to a heart attack, and Khan’s mother told the minister to mind his own business. But Ramadoss is undeterred in his crusade against evil agents of the media-industrial complex.

This is not to discount the seductive power of images, the fact that a lit cigarette or smoke-wreathed rooms carry powerful associations in old movies and in real life. But making Shah Rukh Khan stub out his cigarette isn’t going to strip away those overlays — they will gradually lose their force as the link between the image and the association is weakened, as smoking gets pathologised in our wider culture (which it already has to a large extent). While movie images are part of our cultural cortex, restricting artistic expression for these doubtful ends is looking at the issue from the wrong end. Claims that the drunken-misery scene in Om Shanti Om was a deplorable incitement to vice makes us wonder whether the minister knows that paranoia is a serious medical condition as well.

Ramadoss’s public health prescriptions are getting more and more intrusive, trailing beleaguered citizens into movies and sporting events, restaurants and workplaces. How far can a government encroach upon individual choices? Is it the government’s problem anyway, when there are far more pressing issues screaming for attention? The “nanny state” phenomenon covers a wide range from the benign (iodised salt and vaccinations) to the bizarre, and in a country where half of the children are malnourished, the health minister could chase some larger ambitions. Meanwhile, may we gently suggest that the minister, for his own mental equanimity, cut back on the movies and cricket? And credit us, the masses, with some free will.