Through the smokescreen

If you see smoke curling up from below your dining table, panic not. It8217;s probably nothing serious. Just your next door neighbour havin...

If you see smoke curling up from below your dining table, panic not. It8217;s probably nothing serious. Just your next door neighbour having a quiet smoke at a place where he feels reasonably secure. He feels hounded by the law and when it8217;s not the law, the love of his life. So the situation now is that he can8217;t smoke in public places and he can8217;t smoke in private places and having seen me walk down the street like Lord Macaulay with a open book reading John Stewart Mill8217;s seminal essay 8220;On Liberty8221;, he feels that I may not hound him out of my house. Actually despite being a non-smoker, having been strenuously discouraged by a young lady in my college days from smoking, I feel a great deal of sympathy for him. I feel he is being hounded and is being treated like a pariah all for nothing.

I will take the most damaging argument against smoking at the outset. A study in a town in the United States found that when smoking was stopped heart attacks went down. But believe me, if you stopped bosses from shouting at their subordinates or wives from walking out on their husbands or the stock market from gyrating like the dickens, heart attacks would also go down. Probably more than with a ban on smoking. And these three activities are tolerated, if not encouraged by society. The first is called freedom of trade and commerce, the second feminism, and the third a healthy correction by pundits.

The second argument is that it is invasive. In a restaurant, so the argument goes, smoke drifts from across the table and surrounds you. Despite the fact that you don8217;t want to smoke, you end up smoking. But what of the young lady of the next table who talks loudly on the phone discussing this flower arrangement or make-up artistes, surely that is invasive too. And when she stretches her leg out towards you, though she probably meant to trip the waiter due to shoddy service, your blood pressure jumps. But nobody stops that. As Voltaire once said, no man is an island to himself. But who listens to him these days. After all, he was French.

The third argument is that he is killing himself and doesn8217;t even know it. But as an adult of sound mind, that is his call to make. In any event as the poet said, 8220;in the long run we are all dead8221;.

But it is being done in America, so we should do it. I don8217;t know whether you have noticed but lately America has stopped believing in freedom, although its president is talking a lot about it. But should we?