How options trading became India’s new smoking habit

One of my enduring memories from Hindi cinema is Dev Anand, the epitome of the romantic hero, playing a carefree army officer and lip-syncing to Mohammed Rafi’s “Har fikr ko dhuen mein udaata chala gaya”.

- HARSH ROONGTA

What lingers is not just his charisma, Rafi’s silken voice, or Sahir’s words, but the cigarette dangling from his fingers, smoke curling lazily into the air. The masculinity and romance of that moment were inseparable from smoking. This was the 1960s, long before “Smoking Kills” warnings made their way into cinema.

Six decades later, the imagery around smoking could not be more different. The romance has been stripped away, replaced by Akshay Kumar reminding audiences that “Herogiri phoo phookarne mein nahi hoti”, and disturbing visuals of a middle-aged woman with half her jaw removed due to oral cancer, shown in mandatory theatre documentaries. The transformation has been deliberate and uncomfortable.

The deglamourisation of smoking has succeeded to a meaningful extent. Among GenZ, it is no longer seen as sophisticated or adult, but as dirty, unhealthy, and self-destructive — pushed firmly out of the aspirational mainstream.