Karnataka - Bangalore

Dissuading youth from smoking

Special Correspondent

Three students get together to dissuade young people from smoking

Bangalore: They call themselves the SWAT team — short for Students Working Against Tobacco. For more than a year they are campaigning to persuade high school and college students not to pick up that first cigarette.

Suniti Varma, Anuja Kulkarni and Abraham Varkey are students at the Event Management Development Institute here, which has made it easy for them to build campaigns around the theme of young people having fun without smoking.

"Since December, we have been arranging smokeless parties at pubs frequented by youth and it has made even the older customers there to give up smoking for an evening. It has also shown the young students it is not so cool or fashionable to be puffing away," says Suniti.

"We are trying to persuade the pub managements to have designated non-smoking zones if possible... a few restaurants in Bangalore already offer them," says Anuja. Abraham explains how the smokeless parties have been successful: "We simply fill the large ash trays on pub tables and on bar counters with fresh cut flowers; the contrast with reeking tobacco is enough to convince most people not to reach for a cigarette at least for that one evening."

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