Think A While

When the Sensex is booming, one may be tempted to invest recklessly. Stock markets are an easy way to make money. Everywhere else you add money; this where you multiply it. What the market speculator often forgets is that what goes up must come down. So when the Sensex tumbles, the reckless speculator is left crying as if on spilt milk.

Being reckless with money is bad but not that bad. If one has lost money today, one may recover it tomorrow. But one just can’t be reckless with one’s health. Once it is wrecked it is quite often irretrievably lost. Even if one recovers, in most cases one doesn’t get back to being as fit as one was earlier.

Hence the old adage: Prevention is better than cure. Let’s take a resolve to say no to tobacco. It is curious how we start toying with tobacco. Initially one takes a pinch of it from someone as a token of cordiality. Or, one smokes in one’s youthful days to make a statement of attitude. Soon, however, this conscious flirting turns into addictive love for this nicotine-containing substance (I also committed the same mistake in my graduating Days).

The Government, sliding with the anti-tobacco lobby, is doing its best to stop the hazard without being dictatorially repressive. From now on, every time you buy a tobacco product, pictorial warnings in the form of a scorpion or lungs will stare at you, covering at least 40% of the principal area of the product pack. Though the skull-and-crossbones image initially proposed would have been more scaring, even a scorpion will remind you of staying away from the poison.

If the anti-tobacco lobby is to be believed, a cigarette stick is an explosive cocktail of more than 4,000 chemicals. Apart form the addictive nicotine; it contains hazardous substances like rat poison (Arsenic), insecticide (DDT), preservation fluid (formaldehyde), fuels (butane and methanol), radio active material (Polonium 210) and toilet cleaning acids.

Tobacco then is too bad to be consumed. But the habit of consuming it is too widely prevalent to be given up. Should we still hope for a tobacco-less world? Perhaps yes. If Left can lose so badly in Bengal, anything can happen.

©Surya.