confessions of a former beedikhor

Me, smoker. Apun suttebaaz. Aami beedikhor. Was. Tha. Chhilaam.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the Bengali genetic makeup. Bengalis tend to be lousy at sports, awful at managing their own businesses, pretty much amount to nothing at national level politics and are slowly degenerating to a second rate race. I don't quite know what holds the race together except for the deep rooted conviction that we have got it right, and everyone else is messing up. That, and the fact that 6.7 out of 10 Bengali men smoke. (Ok, I just made that statistic up, but there is some truth to it.) There has to be a reason why India's largest tobacco company is based in Calcutta. Yes, so we smoke. Like bloody chimneys, I may add.

I stayed away from this great habit until university. Sometime around the third question in some gawd-awful Qmech homework set, (that time when a cup of tea from the late night cafe by the gym is the only chance u have of making it till 4 am) I found Anirban puffing way to glory outside. Well, that was my first pull on a cigarette, any cigarette, in fact. And that happened to be a Charms. Now this is not something for the uninitiated. People who smoke Charms are pretty much skating on the edge. This is the point where a sutta becomes something above and beyond a social thing; you smoke because you must. Because, without the fix of nicotine, you can't function and start calculating eigenfunctions which are not orthonormal.

Some months later, I found myself in the same position, can't face a day without my morning cigarette. And i was fortunate enough to have as my closest buddies, a bunch of hardcore smokers. To also have as my labmates, a bunch of smokers. To have as my neighbour in the hostel, a smoker. To have, in effect, smokers all around me. Quitting wasn't a viable option. And who wanted to quit? Those were happy days.