India Uncut
This blog has moved to its own domain. Please visit IndiaUncut.com for the all-new India
Uncut and bookmark it. The new site has much more content and some new sections, and you can read about them here and here. You can subscribe to full RSS feeds of all the sections from here.
This blogspot site will no longer be updated, except in case of emergencies, if the main site suffers a prolonged outage. Thanks - Amit.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
An equal opportunity destroyer
Smoking, that is. So says Dush Ramachandran in his excellent post, "Guns don't kill, smoking does!" Among the many fine points he makes:
[I]n the more traditional societies, smoking seems to be considered a sign of a woman's emancipation. If a woman smokes then she must have thrown off the yoke of male domination, and saying to her (male) oppressors "I am equal to you in every way". How ironic, that when a woman feels she is empowered to make her own decisions, she makes a decision that weakens her rather than making her strong.Indeed. I'm against smoking, by and by, not because of the damage smokers do to themselves: I couldn't care less how much you harm yourself, it's your life and your body. But smoking harms the people around you, and as you presumably hang around people you care about, family and friends and suchlike, it makes the act of smoking all the more befuddling. No?
