Sunday, September 09 2007
This commentary by Jug Suraiya in
The Times of India describes the cigar-smoking author's recent experience with Britain's new smoking laws.
September 9, 2007 - The Indian team vs the Pakistan XI? Israelis vs Palestinians? Bush vs Osama? Pepsi vs Coke? They're all up there on the adversarial stakes. But there's one antagonistic pair, one lot of people whom a symbiotically other lot of people most love to hate, which is off the charts of mutual malevolence: smokers and anti-smokers. And the war between them is getting hotter.
In Britain, where I was recently, the battle lines were fiercely drawn as of July 1 when smoking was officially banned inside all enclosed spaces: pubs, bars, restaurants, night clubs, theatres, offices, bus depots, train terminals, and, presumably, your own coffin when they finally laid you to rest after you'd succumbed to an overdose of smokeless, sanitised air. You could still smoke outside, or atop, buildings, on the street or on the roof. But apparently the anti-smoking lobby is planning to tighten the laws, as has been done in other countries, whereby you can't smoke anywhere within 25 feet in any direction of a designated non-smoking building. Which means that smokers will have to carry with them, apart from their cigarettes, cigars, pipes, hookahs, etc, a measuring tape to mark off where the nix-nicotine zone ends from the side of an edifice. Or from its rooftop, 25 feet above which you may, if you must, light up, with the help of levitation or by dangling from a hired helicopter. (More)
