STOP SMOKING…?

I am a smoker; a chain smoker, to be precise. And I love smoking. It’s not that I don’t know about the adverse effects that cigarettes cause on me, but simply I love doing it so much so that I don’t care about that.

But this lady, Neha Sonwalkar, mused me in writing this blog with her threats that I am surviving with each and every puff of smoke I inhale. I never knew I am taking so many filthy and dangerous stuffs in.

1. Tar: used in paving streets-and-driveways and that’s why smokers have yellow teeth.
2. Hydrogen Cyanide: this chemical is used to kill rodents.
3. Benzene: they use it to manufacture gasoline.
4. Acetone: it’s in your nail polish.
5. Formaldehyde: they use it to preserve dead bodies and in glues and adhesives.
6. Ammonia: it is used in cleaning houses.
7. Carbon Monoxide: it’s in car exhaust and in cigarettes too.
8. Additionally, cigarettes do also have nicotine that stems the addiction.

Ironically after I finished reading this article, instead of worrying over my heath, I marveled over the capacity of my body to resist such mal-effects. Though, in resisting that, I would have to spare around seven years of my life – the article said, that people who smoke a pack a day die on average seven days earlier than people who never smoked – but this is worthwhile.

For example, consider people who work in shipyards. They deal in asbestos and are, thence, prone to imbibe a dangerous disease – asbestosis. Don’t they know about the ill-effects of such hazardous working conditions? Don’t they know that they are risking their lives for a livelihood? But still they do it. They risk their life for something they value more than just living a life. For them, it’s their bread, for me it’s my pleasure.

The supreme responsibility of a man is to make himself happy, whatever be the mean or destination. And if that is cigarette, let that be.

Besides, smokers help economy. They help employment. They help countries. They help humanity.

In any way, you wouldn’t come out of life alive. So why not spare a little of your time in pursuing your happiness?

“I like cigarettes, Miss Taggart. I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. Fire, a dangerous force, tamed at his fingertips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone, watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come from such hours. When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression.” – Atlas Shrugged.

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With your next cigarette – smoke the guilt away!