Baba Ramdev's recent video about starting a 'sherbet jihad' against (presumably) the iconic Rooh Afza put me in mind of another jihad that has been raging for some time now but hasn't got the attention it deserves.

I refer to the 'cigarette jihad' against smokers, which is far more ubiquitous than the other jihads: the latter are limited in scope, applicable only to members of certain religions, but the cigarette jihad applies across the board to everyone who smokes, irrespective of his or her religion, and is a shocking display of secularism, in my view.

No one but a smoker understands fully the import of the saying: you can run but you can't hide; for a smoker today, there's no place to hide (and have a quiet puff) — he is banished from restaurants, cinema halls, buses and metros, drawing rooms, planes and airports, and even in his own castle he has to take refuge in either a toilet or a balcony. His social status is lower than that of a Punjabi or Gujarati immigrant in Trump's America.

Doctors talk down to him, finance ministers treat him like a milch cow, hotels consign him to non-smoking rooms without any room service, airport managers shove him into smoking cubicles resembling tandoors, socialites turn up their rump at him with a flounce, pretty girls refuse to share their mobile numbers with him.

In Washington for a World Bank meeting, I had to go down 30 floors, out in the freezing cold, every time I wished to have a cigarette. Cadging a few million dollars from the bank certainly wasn't worth the effort. But it wasn't always so for people of my generation.

I started smoking in my first year in college and have not looked back since, except to recollect, with a touch of nostalgia, the good days we have left behind. Those were the days of Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando and Humphrey Bogart, who always spoke through a cloud of smoke. One could smoke anywhere........

© National Herald