Friday 30 May 2008

Confessions of a closet smoker

I am a one-cigarette-a-day man. Sounds suspiciously like a fidelity statement, no? Like, I am a one-woman man: Don’t ask me for a commitment on that. If desires were translated to sins, hell fires await me…Coming to smoking, I eagerly wait for the moment I wind up work in Office each day. Go to the car park and smoke an ultra light cigarette. Deeply enjoying the moment. Away from prying eyes. It is my idea of unwinding/ de- stressing. I overhear snatches of conversation among Officers from the Armed Forces. Typical conversation in Punjabi-English, the Lingua Franca of the Indian Army Officer no matter where he comes from, runs like this:
Junior/smart/handsome Officer : Good evening Sir
Senior Officer: (Patronizingly) Good evening. How are you?
JO : Absolutely fine , Sir
SO: How is Neetu, Chintu, Mintu….?
(Neetu being the young Officer’s young attractive wife and Chintu/Mintu the little monsters)
JO : First class…..On top of the world , Sir. Neetu was asking about you just the other day, Sir
SO walks away into the sunset smiling… pleased to hear that the young attractive Neetu has remembered SO
JO walks away hoping that he made a good impression on the SO and the same would translate into good grades in the Annual Confidential report.
In the summers there is an air of stillness around. The leaves are dry, the grass parched. An occasional bird chirps, but it is not dark yet. The dome of South Block in sandstone looms ahead majestically. In winters, it is dark by 5.30 pm. There is frost in the air. It is biting cold and very lonely. I watch the Langur catcher who is taking a break smoking a bidi while his Langur is busy scratching its’ baby's head for lices. I see a lot of drivers playing cards on the grass. It is quite relaxing. Except for the occasional retinue of cars carrying an important politico with revolving lights passing nearby breaking the silence.
These are times when the Health Minister to everyone in civil society pours scorn on the smoker. The smoker is an irritant, a leech, and a polluter. To be able to smoke a cigarette away from the prying eyes of civilized society is indeed a privilege. I smoked a cigarette with a beer in a pub in London just a few days before the ban came in to effect from July 2007. I did it in honour of Inspector Morse, my favorite hero of detective novels written by Colin Dexter.
How times have changed… There was a time not too long ago, when the act of smoking defined the persona of male machismo. An after dinner smoke was an occasion for male bonding. There were some who would slowly take the cigarettes from a round aluminum tin containing enough coffin sticks to bring early onset of cancer and light up with a golden lighter. There were others who would flash amusing brands like. …Passing Show (featuring a fat man with huge side burns wearing a tunic and a top hat, next to a horse and buggy - could never figure out what it signified? a magic show? theatre?) There were those who could blow smoke rings slowly into the air. Those who held the cigarettes in style and imparted a whole element of style to the process of inhaling and exhaling polluted air. Then there was Rajnikanth, the dark non descript Tamil Actor who made flicking cigarettes into his mouth after twisting & letting them hang in the air into a style industry. You could see auto rickshaw drivers in Chennai trying to imitate him.
We started smoking in college for …hm… style. Somehow we thought that women are attracted to men with normal characteristics of …well men. Proof doesn’t exist of anyone in College ensnaring a woman to his bed/heart with his smoking/style of smoking. The few who did indeed manage to attract women were non-smokers. We still puffed away in eternal hope….
My father has been a smoker for as long as I can remember. Early years I remember him smoking triple fives. He even maintained his brand preferences for a few years in India (including Black label whisky). When he migrated to India finally, he realized the futility and high cost of hanging on to the symbols of past glory. He rapidly graduated to Wills filter, Panama and even bidis once in a while. He is 87 now and is reasonably healthy except for the occasional memory lapse. If anyone needs proof that smoking increases longevity, I could show that right at home.
When I joined for training, as probationer in my present job, there was this girl, let us call her V. A JNU product, a closet smoker, she was the daughter of a senior bureaucrat in Government. To explain this you must get an idea of the atmosphere in the Staff College in Nagpur. The majority in our batch were young probationers fresh out of great Engineering Colleges/ RECs/IITs and a few like us who were from humanities. The Engineers were just out of college without work experience and the rest of us had earlier experience in other jobs. V identified me early as one of the occasional smokers and a possible source of regular supply of cigarettes. When I would be walking back to my room after a late dinner in the Mess hall, she would often pull me into her room and bum a cigarette off me. We would sit quietly and smoke in her balcony and I would leave. Many young Engineer onlookers had other ideas of a Boy and girl alone in a room in the dead of night. Like… the most complicated poses in Kamasutra were being enacted inside. …? Chi Chi. V was madly in love with a young Sardar (whom she married later) and would share stories with me. Anyway soon V’s habits were public knowledge and she dropped the veneer of secrecy and started smoking in public. She was great company. We often went to a bar in Nagpur to have a beer. In the 90s’ small town India, the sight of a woman smoking and drinking can create strange reactions in the male hormones. You could almost see a rush among males to somehow impress her and looks of envy towards me. I have a sis in law who puffs away something like 2-3 packs a day. She is a senior diplomat and a great pal of mine. I often worry about her health. I often wonder if it is not the mythical weight reduction properties of smoking that drive women to smoking. In Europe I always see more women than men smoking.
They say smoking kills. I ask, even one cigarette a day? If so, then so be it. Many die in accidents, bomb blasts, shootings, poor medical care, broken down lifts, rash driving, air crashes, train accidents, lightning, falling coconuts, electric shock, depressions and even sheer boredom. Read the story of the King of Patiala and you will know what I mean - Evidence points to his death by imbibing excessive wine, super excessive sex and the unimaginable boredom that it all brings - Aha some are destined to die of acute hedonism. The rest, are destined to die of denial. I am but a number in that statistic.

Thursday 8 May 2008

O'Rourke on Adam Smith

A candid confession first- I didn’t pay the 21 dollar 95 cents that it would have cost Average Joe to buy this book. I borrowed it from the MOD library, in South Block, the seat of power in New Delhi: Which incidentally conceals many precious tomes within its’ unappealing but cavernous interiors. It cost me nothing since the membership comes as perks of the job. Ordinarily I would have dropped this on reading the price tag in South Extension’s Midland bookshop. And it isn’t really the kind of book that is peddled by the book pirates in Bombay traffic signals. I recall buying Musharraff’s biography from the book pirates in Vile Parle, Mumbai on a principle that thou shall not pay royalty to thy enemy.
Why is the original wealth of Nations 892 ½ pages long? The reasons are not far to seek. Smith was an accomplished Public Speaker. The natural verbosity of dictation must have made the book long. Secondly, Smith had the tendency to qualify his statements to achieve the hue and tint he desired. The seeds of many ideas propounded therein could be traced back to the public speeches he made. Now you could have an entertaining capsule form of the book with hilarious examples to appreciate it better.
To understand the wealth of Nations better one ought to read the theory of moral sentiments, says O’Rourke. The Wealth is divided into five books. Book 1 on production and distribution, book 2 on profits, book 3 on economic history of Europe, book 4 is a refutation of economic ideas other than his own and book 5 is his attempt to apply his ideas to solve the problems of the Govt. I quote O’Rourke verbatim since I haven’t touched the original “Wealth…” or for that matter the “Origin of Species” which I understand is tough reading. I did attempt to read Cosmos by Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking greatest unread classic “ A brief History of Time”. Found myself distracted too often. They occupy the pride of place in my bookshelf. Wealth of Nations wasn’t exactly prescribed reading for Economics Masters course in Kerala University in the eighties. Many of our Professors were overt communists and covert consumerists. Marxian dialectics was the in thing. Every thing was analyzed from the Marxist perspective…art, literature, cinema, Silk Smitha and Shakeela (couple of sexy sirens from South Indian moviedom). Adam Smith was old hat: an idea whose time has gone past its’ expiry date.
The pace of reading was leisurely in the 1700s and there wasn’t much on TV . ( I was strongly reminded of my growing up years in a village in Palakkad, Kerala, where the pace of life not very different from Smith’s time) Smith could at times sound like a precursor to Karl Marx when ascribed the original value of things to labour much before Marx did. At times he could sound like the father of Neocons and other times like a news anchor on Fox TV. “ The oppression of the poor must establish the monopoly of the rich”, he said. He was no moralist nor did he go into the original reasons for disparity of wealth. The reasons for this unapologetic worldview are contained in “The theory of Moral sentiments”. He held that the rich consume more than the poor and the sole end along with vain gratification of their desires is division with poor of all the improvements. I have tried to use one fourth of the original construct of Adam Smith just to prove that he indeed saw the offshoot of creation of wealth; the improvement of poor. At the same time there was a kind of finality and inevitability behind disparity in that “They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its’ inhabitants.” So, eat your heart out, all ye dispossessed, don’t sit on dharnas before Jantar Mantar. You deserve it… you had it coming…Let a thousand Narmadas drown you and your holdings beneath the deluge.
Every time the white Caucasian holds forth on the concept of software piracy, intellectual property rights, I am tempted to ask…. What about …ahem …. Property rights? Didn’t marauding red faces bearing a strong resemblance to you usurp the land of Indians in the Wild West? Didn’t the East India Company attach large swathes of land under a dubious construct of Lapse?. But lest we forget, behind every great fortune, there is great crime. This applies to fortunes of nations too. Software piracy by China and India are early steps towards great fortunes. I digress. We are talking about the seminal and soul defining work of capitalism, An enquiry into the wealth of Nations. It would be unfair to P J O’Rourke to call this book a spoof. It is as erudite but not bone tickling as one would wish the “Das Capital” were. Written in a time when the lingo of scholarly works in economics hadn’t acquired gravitas that they possess today, the Wealth of Nations is not just an apologist’s version of capitalism. Morality, Philosophy and Economics had found many common intertwining elements before Amartya Sen gave it a jargon of its’ own.
Considering that in the real world one would try to maximize self-interest, Adam Smith based it as the cornerstone of his work. He accidentally or otherwise digressed into many areas outside his element. O’Rourke has real world examples which are side splitting. O’Rourke says rather modestly that his job is to make quips and jests and somewhere in Mumbai, there is a younger, funnier person who is willing to work for less. Maybe my favourite blogger Sidin Vadukut can do a better job.(Read Whatay.com and you will know what I mean). But O’Rourke’s comparisons with today’s America are truly cheering.
Adam Smith criticized Mercantilism for the inherent contradictions it contained. China, the neo mercantilist version of today must meet its’ nemesis if Smith were to be believed. Smith provided the basis for paper money when much of the world thought it would make money free. Smith would certainly be turning in his grave when he knows of the extents to which money out of nothing could be made by innovative financial products and derivatives trading. Smith spoke of less Government and considered the labour of Govt as unproductive. What I all along suspected as a Govt Official is yelled out by Smith centuries ago.
Book 3 examines the institutions and deals with the moral basis of capitalism. “To improve land with profit requires an exact attention to small savings and small gains, of which a man born to a great fortune is very seldom capable” wrote Smith. Stories of first generation entrepreneurs in India and the down fall of great families which fought over division of wealth and then went on to blow it all on blondes and holidays in Nice prove it. Every time I see a snooty nosed customer throwing tantrums in a five star hotel, I am tempted to remind him that the waiter can always spit into his food and have him unsuspectingly consume it. Every time I see an overpaid marketing executive, I recollect the number of sugared water in branded bottles and packaged chip I have consumed that go into sustaining his uppity lifestyle. No pangs of social conscience for Adam Smith. At times he can turn post modernist and Marxist at the same time (minus the incomprehensible jargon).
Chapter 13 “ An inquiry into Adam Smith” is the funniest. Smith never married. Spent his leisure time teaching his nephew. He resigned his professorship to tutor the young Duke of Buccleuch and tried to return the students’ fees since he had to leave midterm. Students liked him so much that none would accept a refund. He was splendidly absentminded, says O’Rourke. Given to wandering fifteen miles from home in robe and slippers. I wish I could quote the entire chapter. But the thought of being hauled up for copyright violation and the discomforts of fighting legal battles/ spending jail terms at middle age restrains me from doing so.
Read it… You will love it.