Kick Butt
Once we are done having our tea, we throw the ash of our cigarettes into the cup turned ash tray. There is one remedy to this bad habit – serve tea in ash trays.
Somewhere along the line tea and tobacco became good friends. Hence it is part and parcel of the classic adda, more so when it's all about the camaraderie during the benign backbiting or the sinister conspiring.
We pick up smoking while barely in our double digits. Other than to impress, well, other guys, we are in a hurry to grow up and look older. And the wish comes true – by the time we're thirty, we look sixty, thanks to the wrinkles.
We look cool as a cucumber while we cough and look manly as the Marlboro Man who is long dead from lung cancer.
As for myself, I just couldn't find the logic in spending money to buy something that warrants the fire truck to hose down my throat while having charcoal for lungs. Thank Heavens for my consumer ADHD (Attention Deficit in High Definition), for I never went past the nicotine addiction stage.
But whoever it was, was a genius (an evil one in retrospect), to latch on nicotine for market sustainability and customer loyalty. So, why not have the boys (and gals) start early and have loyalty turn into lifelong ('life' and 'long'? Oxymoron?) customers enrolled in frequent smoker programmes?
Hence the cultlike dedication – strangers huddled inside a glass box called 'Smoking Zone' at airports, the silhouettes barely visible amidst the smoke. Onlookers (like zoo visitors) from outside almost expect that once (if at all) the smoke clears, Boney M would emerge with a disco beat. Pity these passengers on 17 hour trans Pacific flights, jittery to the point of taking a chance to walk on to the aircraft wing only for a smoke, if they can light it that is.
On the surface, they also risk it all. 'No smoking within 50 feet of building' means it's ok to smoke at 50.1 feet. Given that the sidewalk is just 10 feet wide, you're smoking smack in the middle of the busy street.
However, changes have come. Benson and Hedges World Cup Cricket sounds almost like a fairy tale. The tobacco industry is forced to pay for anti-smoking billboards sporting: "Kissing a smoker is like licking an ash tray…" I wonder how McDonalds would do if they said, "French fries can cause heart attacks."
Yet, profits soar. Even more so in developing countries where there is a grey line into being able to market below the belt, er, below the line (BTL).
To guard against this, the West checks IDs before selling tobacco products. But who are we kidding? Even the kids there come up with fake IDs. Genuine ID-ing would work here – we wouldn't be able to smoke till we are grandparents. After all, we have two ages – the real and the certificate age. Again, who are we kidding? It is the kid who is rolling the bidi for another kid to pick up the habit.
Is there a way to kick the habit? There are genuine attempts. And so grows the other industry – the nicotine patch, electronic cigarette, and hey, chewing gum (not applicable to Singapore). The products sell, but truth be told, some quit and the majority go back to square one like a drop of blood turning a vegetarian shark into its original carnivore self. It's like the arms trade – sell arms, have wars, then do reconstruction which is good business. And the cycle repeats.
The business, pretty darned lucky. The consumers, maybe not quite so…But at least, see if you can have a kick (cigarette) butt day. It may just be worth it…
The writer is an engineer at Ford & Qualcomm USA and CEO of IBM & Nokia Siemens Networks Bangladesh turned comedian (by choice), the host of NTV's The Naveed Mahbub Show and the founder of Naveed's Comedy Club.
E-mail: [email protected]
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