The lights are going out all over India, and we will not see them lit again in our — possibly lengthened — lifetimes. The most demonised of minorities, already crushed under the weight of punitive taxation and social opprobrium, is now further marginalised; India’s crusading health minister has dragooned us into joining the 70-plus countries with nationwide restrictions on smoking in “public” places.

When US states, beginning with California in 1999, started banning indoor smoking, I began keeping a small if slightly obsessive spreadsheet of the places in the world where I would like to live but couldn’t till I gave up smoking. Ireland, the home of pubs filled with what Seamus Heaney called “gregarious smoke”, became the first entire country to ban indoor smoking in 2004; and as the usual progressive suspects — Norway, New Zealand and the like — started implementing similar restrictions, I began to feel quite unwanted.

It was difficult to avoid the feeling that an era was ending. Ever since Walter Raleigh popularised it in the Elizabethan court — earning for his effort the privilege of being cursed in song by a John Lennon in suffering from cigarette-induced insomnia (“such a stupid git”) — tobacco, like alcohol, has become intertwined with society, with tradition and social ritual. In the dandyish, degenerate Regency period, men duelled over the aesthetics of snuffboxes. The trenches of World War I may have developed superstitions about how many cigarettes you could light with one match. Tobacco has symbolised, at different times and places, friendship, peace, sexual availability, and capitalist greed. Physicians prescribed it for asthma, for ulcers, for all manner of nervous disorders. All popular depictions of FDR featured a shawl across his withered knees, and a cigarette holder held at a jaunty angle in his mouth; a New York Times profile of Kamaraj in the ’60s featured his addiction to Gold Flakes. Queen Victoria detested it, and banned it from royal palaces; Adolf Hitler, a man of slightly larger ambitions, launched massive anti-smoking campaigns, complete with all the bells and whistles his propaganda machine could provide. (Thus, if you are forced, at some point, to call someone turning up their nose at your cigarette a Nazi, it is at least less unfair than when the word is generally thrown about.) And, of course, Gandhiji famously stole money for cigarettes when a teenager.

... contd.