AP Features, January 28th, 2008
India's health minister has reignited the debate about smoking, saying actors should stop puffing away on screen — a call one of the country's biggest stars criticized as censorship.
Even as an increasing number of countries clamp down on smoking, people in India freely puff away in playgrounds, railway stations, sidewalk cafes and even hospitals, a situation that Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss has long sought to change.
He has helped enact a number of laws banning smoking in various public places — most of them routinely ignored — and on Sunday he urged Bollywood stars to stub out their smokes on screen.
"We have statistics which show that 52 percent of children have their first puff because of movie celebrities," Ramadoss told CNN-IBN news channel.
He cited by name arguably the country's two biggest male stars — Amitabh Bachchan, universally known as the Big B, and Shah Rukh Khan, whom nearly everyone calls King Khan.
Bachchan has brushed off such suggestions in the past, and Khan was having none of it on Monday.
"I think there is a huge amount of creative freedom that should be allowed in cinema and the arts," he told the news channel. Smoking in the movies is "make believe ... we must not have too much censorship on that."
About 250 million people use tobacco in India. Smoking and chewing tobacco kills more than 900,000 people every year, according to the Health Ministry.
A recent government effort to introduce pictorial warnings, recommended by the World Health Organization, has run into legal delays with tobacco companies fighting to keep them off boxes.
