"None of the actors in the programme encourage or endorse smoking" proclaimed a public interest advert on the telly, more out of a legal obligation to do so than out of conviction. I would imagine that it should be quite easy not to show on-screen smoking or drinking. Don't non-smoking villains and vamps exist? Judging by Indian movies, it would be difficult to conceive of villains and vamps who do not smoke or drink.
Could it be that the Indian mind associates smoking or drinking with badness / moral decay?
When I was growing up in Madras, the association between smoking and eternal damnation was very clear and straight forward: most believed, especially among Tambrams, that smoking led to drinking, drinking led to chasing women and chasing women led straight to Hell. Mathematically inclined that the Tambrams were (and still are), the equation was plain and simple: Smoking equals Damnation with a constant thrown in (S = D+k).
Not chasing women might have gone down well with the 60's and earlier generations, but today it might well be symptom of a malaise deserving a worse Hell than the normal one in the Tambram scheme of things. This raises the notion of different grades of Hell - a relatively less disagreeable one for minor infractions, worse ones for husband-beaters (wife-beating seems to be approved behaviour), progressing on to the deepest and hottest level for those guilty of "Moral Turpitude".
What constituted the aforementioned MT changes with the times. All you have to do is invent worse forms of behaviour for previously unacceptable ones to become tolerable ones. Standards of "public morality" and public behaviour are lightening. Faced with the spectre of same-sex couples in PDAs, the general public is willing to "tolerate" PDAs between opposite sexes. I also see around me attitudes to inter-caste or inter-religious marriages relaxing - the possibility of the son / daughter taking up with a man / woman boggles many a mind.
The opposite is sometimes true, as captured in a mischievous email joke about a grandmother's relief that her grandson's love interest is a boy from the same caste as opposed to a girl from a different caste!
The truth is when faced with a worse possibility, we are willing to accept what was earlier unacceptable.
Could it be that the Indian mind associates smoking or drinking with badness / moral decay?
When I was growing up in Madras, the association between smoking and eternal damnation was very clear and straight forward: most believed, especially among Tambrams, that smoking led to drinking, drinking led to chasing women and chasing women led straight to Hell. Mathematically inclined that the Tambrams were (and still are), the equation was plain and simple: Smoking equals Damnation with a constant thrown in (S = D+k).
Not chasing women might have gone down well with the 60's and earlier generations, but today it might well be symptom of a malaise deserving a worse Hell than the normal one in the Tambram scheme of things. This raises the notion of different grades of Hell - a relatively less disagreeable one for minor infractions, worse ones for husband-beaters (wife-beating seems to be approved behaviour), progressing on to the deepest and hottest level for those guilty of "Moral Turpitude".
What constituted the aforementioned MT changes with the times. All you have to do is invent worse forms of behaviour for previously unacceptable ones to become tolerable ones. Standards of "public morality" and public behaviour are lightening. Faced with the spectre of same-sex couples in PDAs, the general public is willing to "tolerate" PDAs between opposite sexes. I also see around me attitudes to inter-caste or inter-religious marriages relaxing - the possibility of the son / daughter taking up with a man / woman boggles many a mind.
The opposite is sometimes true, as captured in a mischievous email joke about a grandmother's relief that her grandson's love interest is a boy from the same caste as opposed to a girl from a different caste!
The truth is when faced with a worse possibility, we are willing to accept what was earlier unacceptable.
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