Canteen Diaries, Puffing away life through cigarettes

Don’t fool yourself by thinking smoking makes you cool and compels the hidden intellectual genius in you to come out, when you know the inescapable, deadly truth behind it…

Facts and data courtesy: Dr. Deepak Vyas

It’s eight o’ clock in the morning, you have been snoozing away the alarm for a while now and you are already late for the class. While you are struggling to open your eyes, your hands are searching for something – your lighter and pack of cigarettes. Somehow you get up and light a cigarette before even opening your eyes completely. A lot of you do it because you think otherwise you will not get motions properly and constipation will kill you. But mostly, you are just addicted to the habit of smoking in the morning.

You reach the class and as soon as the lecture before the lunch break finishes, you rush to the canteen and stuff yourself with anything that looks palatable to you at that time. At the back of your mind, there is always an urgency to finish the food because you should be, in any case, left with a calculated time to go out of the campus and take a few drags before you are ready for the next class.

The college gets over for the day and the only thing in your mind is to go out and smoke a cigarette before thinking what next to do in the day. Looks like the cigarette plays an integral, inseparable part of college life and this is when most of you actually take your first drags. There is always someone atleast in the group who smokes, which is then followed by the rest of you. It does give a kick to light a cigarette and take in a few drags and you think you feel relaxed or are intellectually stimulated. No discussions, which involve a bit of creativity or grey matter, can happen without cigarettes. It is as if it compels you to bring out the hidden genius in you, which otherwise will remain stashed away in oblivion. Though it’s a wonderful feeling to remain inside your own bubble, you need to come to terms with the ground reality, which you are well aware of.

You have heard it a million times, read about it everywhere, have been brought up with this info and everytime you catch a film in a theatre, you have no option but to refresh your memory again. Smoking is dangerous and in severe cases, the reason behind death. You know this quite well so I won’t reiterate the fact that you need to quit puffing away your life in swirls of deadly smoke, if you really want to live longer.

According to Dr. Deepak Vyas, here are some hard facts which you should know if you like your cigarette too much:

Smoking is the largest single preventable cause of illness and premature deaths.
Every year more eight lakhs deaths occurs due to it.
According to CDC (Centre for Diseases Control and Prevention), Worldwide tobacco use causes more than five million deaths per year.
Current trends show that tobacco use will cause more than eight million deaths annually by 2030.
Cigarette smoking is responsible for about one in five deaths annually.
Tobacco smoking harms nearly every organ of our body.
On an average, smokers die ten years earlier than non-smokers.
It is suspected that 90 per cent of all the deaths from chronic obstructive lungs diseases are caused due to smoking.
If nobody smoked, one of every three cancer deaths would not happen.
It increases coronary heart diseases and paralysis by two-four times, the development of lungs cancer in men by 23 times and women by 13 times and deaths due to chronic obstructive lungs diseases by around 13 times.
It causes cancer of oral cavity (mouth),cancer of pharynx (throat), cancer of larynx (voice box), cancer of oesophagus (food pipe),Lungs cancer, stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney cancer, bladder cancer and cancer of cervix.