Tag Archives: tobacco

Prabhu’s death and superstition

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My friend Prabhu died last month because of colon cancer. His death did some serious damage to my life as he was one of my best friends. He was already up anything and everything. I really miss him a lot. I was talking about his death with my two friends- Babu and Rahul. Babu is a graduate in science and Rahul is graduate in arts. Babu was preparing to study in London to both of them are educated and have lived in the city for their whole lives. All of my friends and everyone else who knew Prabhu, knew that he died of colon cancer but Rahul and Babu told me something that shocked me.

They said that one of the biggest reasons of Prabhu’s death was his motorbike which he had bought an year ago. They said that Prabhu’s Saturn was not supporting him and buying anything made of iron is really dangerous for someone whose Saturn is not happy with them. They said that Prabhu made four mistakes: he bought a motorbike, he bought his bike on Saturday, he chose black color for his motorbike and he did not let others drive it. According to Babu and Rahul black color is anti-Saturn color so buying a black motorbike was a serious mistake done by Prabhu.

Prabhu was in love with his motorbike and would not give it to others, not even to his family members and Rahul and Babu think that if he would have given his bike to other people, then it would have decreased the bad affect of Saturn and he would have been able to fight with colon cancer. After hearing this crazy idea I was wondering what could be worse idea than this about such a disease which we really ne to understand. India is changing, our food is changing, life style is changing and I know that such diseases like cancer is going to increase a lot in India and we really need to know what it is but relating cancer to the motorbike?

I often hear about how people mix animal fat with oil and butter, how old potatoes are washed with acid to give them a new look or just how more people eat meat products and I am sure none of these things are good for health. Prabhu’s doctors said that he got cancer because of too much deep friend and spicy food. Prabhu also told me once that he did not eat his luch within past seven years. He had a Kachaudi (deep fried food) shop and he used eat 10-12 Kachaudis with really spicy vegetables every morning and then did not eat anything for the whole day.

Prabhu admitted that he used to use burnt oil to prepare Kachaudi. He ate this crazy food continuously for seven years. His dinner was also usually roti with spicy vegetables. He had hardly eaten lentils for 10-15 times within past seven years. He had serious constipation problem for years but he never saw a doctor for this problem. He used to chew betel and tobacco a lot and I think all these things caused him colon cancer not his black motorbike which he bought on Saturday and would not let others drive it. Sometimes I feel like India is changing because of its young blood but when I see people like Rahul and Babu, it seems like it will still take years for this young Indian blood to be purified and pure that will create a healthy India with healthy mind.

Frustration in villages

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I visited my village after being away for ten years and I saw a lot of changes that made me sad. I used to think that Indian villages were still safe but the reality was completely different. I still remember that there was a pond right in front of my village house but this time half of it was covered with clay and other waste. India’s buying power have increased a lot within past fifteen years, and now people like to buy different things but they do not know how to get rid of the waste that comes out of the stuffs we buy.

I don’t blame people for this problem; government has no plan for waste management. All these things are new to India and we do not know about it, so we need to be educated about it. It has been part of Indian culture to throw rubbish outside of the house, but the good thing about past rubbish was that it was made of natural resources. Cows and other animals have also been wandering here and there in India since India has been in existence and these animals used to finish all that trash because our trash was natural, but now our trash is made of plastic and other strange chemicals and definitely they can not finish it anymore.

People living in the villages have also started buying packed products and usually they throw all the waste in the open spaces or ponds or places like that. Same thing happened with the pond in front of my village house. People throw all of their waste in this pond and now half of the pond is almost gone. People do not know how it will affect their lives in the future. I talked about it with the people in the village and nobody took interest in it. They think that it is good to cover the whole pond because there is always water in it and it spawns mosquitoes.

Of course covering the ponds is not a good solution to get rid of the mosquitoes because they could clean it and keep it clean and then the pond will not spawn mosquitoes. I knew that there was a well near that pond and I was very interested in that well because once about fifteen years ago my brother had fallen in it, so I wanted to see it. However when I reached near that spot, I found that there was nothing like a well here, just nothing. There was plain ground. I was wondering how that well disappeared. I asked my cousin about it and he told me that they had covered that well completely.

It was shocking for me. It did not make any sense to me. I just did not understand why they made that decision. I have seen people facing water shortages and I know how important a well could be to recharge ground water, but the sad thing was that people in my village never thought about it because they did not know about it.  I also talked about it with people and they told me that this well was useless for them. The first reason was that my brother had fallen in it so they were scared that somebody else could fall in it again and the second reason was that the water was not drinkable anymore.

They could have used a screen so that rain water could pass through it but they decided to cover it completely. I saw each and everyone in the village using plastic somehow in their daily lives and they throw all these plastics somewhere out of the house. They just do not know anything about plastics. It is still not too late for the government to control all these bad things and they can do it by introducing environmental studies and making them compulsory for all students.

Villages are also getting huge problems now. The quality of education has decreased a lot, and actually I would say there is not education at all in the villages. Students just go to schools, pass time by massaging the feet of their teachers and finally get a degree, its true. Finally they go to cities to get jobs and find that they can not have a job because they never learnt anything. They find themselves far away from the city life. They can not socialize, can not make friends…

And when they see girls wearing short skirts it increases their sexual frustration. They also want to have sex but in fact they can not have because they can not get integrated. So finally they reach brothels and since they are not aware of the use of condoms, they contract HIV and all other kinds of dangerous sexually transmitted diseases. When they come back to their village, they pass it to someone else. Young people living in villages like chewing gutka a lot which has become the biggest cause of mouth cancer in India. I noticed that most of the young people were chewing gutka.

People say that a third world war will happen for water, and after seeing things going on in India nowadays, it seems to me that India will be the first country to start this war because we will have largest number of people in the whole world. We have killed all of our rivers, have cut down 80% of the jungles and now we have started killing our ground water. The pesticides that have been banned in Europe and America can be easily found in Indian markets and farmers use them for agricultural purposes because they do not know how harmful those pesticides are.

The Indian government seems to have no control over India, over Indian people or over anything and these things will explode in the future like a nuclear bomb. The whole world is doing research to repair the damage we have done to this planet but India seems to be the only country of the world where we have been destroying the planet for years and it doesn’t seem that it will stop soon. If the environment has anything to do in terms of setting quality of living, then Indians will have the worst quality of living in the whole world within next fifteen-twenty years. I don’t know if  the Indian government will ever wake up, but Indians will wake-up someday for sure but by that time it will be too late.

Will No Smoking work in India?

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It sounded like a joke when the Indian government prohibited smoking in public places. They introduced this law on the 2nd of October, the birthday of Gandhi. I was always suspicious whether people would follow this rule. In the very first week after the law was implemented, media people took pictures of people smoking at public places and showed it to the DM (district magistrate) and asked if this rule was made for Benares or not. DM said that they hadn’t got the written copy of rules yet, and that is why they did not know in what case they should stop people.

I was in Delhi few days ago. I went to the Delhi High Court for some work. I was surprised to see that a lot of advocates and the police were smoking inside the high court premises. First of all I thought that I had come to the wrong place because I just could not imagine that law makers would go against the laws that openly. There was a canteen inside the court premises where people could smoke, I am not sure about it, but a lot of people smoking outside of the canteen and most them were advocates.

I came out of the court after finishing my work. There was a tea shop about 50 meters away from the high court. I went there and asked for a tea and a cigarette. The shopkeeper did not have cigarette. I asked him where was the nearest cigarette shop and he said – inside the high court. I asked why he was not selling cigarettes and he replied that it was not allowed to sell tobacco products near the high court area. Then I told him that I had seen a lot of people smoking inside the high court. He also did not know why it was allowed to sell tobacco products inside the court but not outside.

I often see people smoking at public places including inside the trains and buses which has been prohibited for years. All the restaurants that are for foreigners allow their customers to smoke. People talked about this law for the first few days after it was implemented but I am sure nobody ever followed it, and nobody will ever follow it. Just nobody just cares about it. Everybody makes fun of this law. They know that it will never work in India.

Indian government made the law to stop the smoke that comes from cigarettes but the same government took the law called ‘POTA’ (The Prevention of Terrorism Act) back, which was implemented by the last government of BJP, to stop the smoke of gunpowder (terrorism). Terrorism still existed even when this law was in, but it was not too much. Terrorism was very much under control. The number of terrorist activities have increased rapidly after the government took out this law.

The whole world is making new laws to stop terrorism but I think India is the only country which is taking the existing laws back. This law was taken back only because of political reasons. We had sixty-four bomb blasts within the last six months. I don’t know how many people died but we had never seen this many bomb blasts.