Chronicles of a Desperate Ex-Smoker

Quit Smoking Andolan.

Anyone who tells you to quit cold turkey needs to shove that turkey you-know-where. Unless you’re the spawn of Juno and Zeus, there’s no way in hell quitting smoking is easy. Heck, even Hercules had his work cut out for him.

So what made me quit? Frankly, visions of me ending up like Mukesh, ruining almost every single vacay with a killer ENT infection brought on by smoker’s cough (I once paid 100 dollars to a doctor in Singapore), sounding like a wheezy geriatric, and my inability to climb a flight of stairs did the trick.

It happened one night. Me and my homie were chillin’ as usual. Discussing our existential crises. Inhaling, exhaling, passing, you know the drill if you’ve been a smoker. Relevant questions to the universe were posed. Such as “What do you really want to do?”, “why are you earning money?”. And the answers to both, quite simply, were to travel. That’s when I took life advice from a 26 year-old who in his best deadpan, monotone, poker face, said, “Quit smoking.”

Figures, right? Health is wealth and all that. What good was it to invite a coronary on my way to Machu Picchu? So I quit. Right then and there.

Except now it’s been almost a month and every waking hour I’m like that man who can’t stop thinking about sex. Except my phallic symbol is a cigarette. To anyone thinking of quitting, here’s the real picture. There will be triggers that will test your sanity. Mine are as follows.

Yah. Like coaxing ketchup out of an almost-empty bottle.

C’mon, every smoker out there knows when it rains, it’s ‘sutta’ time. I mean a smoke, rain and chai. That’s the holy trinity.

No conclusive study may have proved that smoking relieves stress but boy oh boy, the times I’ve wanted to exhale a cold, thin long stream of smoke. The urge to murder has been quelled by smoke.

Yep, that would be me in full public view.

Now I’m told this is a big one. The post-coital cigarette. For lack of a prolific sex life, you’ll have to make do with Mamta Kulkarni and Mithun da in the sack. Meanwhile, you can also watch this space for how my battle with nicotine ends.