Smoking is so very uncool!

Smoking is definitely one of the most uncool things.... yet the media is rife with images of smoking youngsters, looking hip and cool, and even the expression 'smoking hot' accompanying them, naturally - as if!

I have myself been a chain smoker since I was in the Ninth Standard, and I can say from personal experience that I curse my ill-fated choice, for having wasted precious moments from my life smoking cigarettes, and much else.

It now feels like having burnt my life in smoke, literally.

Who doesn't like to put on an air of desirability by just trying to look like Robert Pattinson, pressing his lips on a cigarette butt? Or like a screen siren blowing out rings of smoke in the air?

The truth, however, is so very far off, from the portrayals in popular media...... smoking is addictive and smoking kills. It's a slow and painful death, no one knows it better than one who has seen a loved one suffer or die from cancer of the lungs or the throat, or from other serious illnesses that stem from the habit of smoking.

The habit is picked up early. No one gets more lured than the kids, by the images of hip movie-stars and teen idols who are shown smoking in films and on telly. Sometimes, completely needlessly the affirmation gets vitiated in the psyche.

It is one thing to make an actor or an actress smoke in a film as per the demands of the character portrayed, but we are exposed to tabloids and photo-shoots of stars with a cigarette hanging from their lips. A Brad Pitt or a Leonardo DiCaprio pic where the cigarette seems like a fun-accessory.

The demonstrative effect of smoking is probably the highest for the age group of 13 to 26 years. People just love to ape the way their idols and even peers embrace the habit of smoking. By the time most of them realize that it has been a colossal waste health-wise and even in terms of the money spent on smoke, it's too late. Much harm is done already, or they are too deep in the addictive grip of it.

The lusty and lascivious look of Shah Rukh Khan lighting up his smoke may be hard to ignore, but such images should strike a statutory warning bell in one's head if one is conditioned not to fall prey to the images. For that, there needs to be a dissemination of information on the ills of smoking at diverse levels, starting from schools and colleges.

Let the patients and the sufferers speak to the teenagers, to the youth. Merely giving a lip-service curb the practice among the youngsters by printing warning labels and issuing diktats against smoking won't work, unless there is real awareness.