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Almost the whole of the country will become a no-smoking zone by May 31 if the health ministry, led by Anbumani Ramadoss, has its way. Homes and designated smoking areas at airports and restaurants will be the only places where one can have a smoke once the government introduces the ‘Smoke-free Workplace Rules.’ Once that happens, India will join the list of countries most intolerant towards smoking.

“The Tobacco Control Act only allows smoking and tobacco-use in designated smoking areas at airports and restaurants seating over 30 people. Once the rules are introduced, these will be the only public places where people will be able to smoke,” says Health Minister Ramadoss.

France and Germany have banned a smoking in public places - including- bars and cafes - from January 1 this year, following the UK which introduced a similar ban in July 2006.

While individual law-breakers will be fined Rs 200, institutions and organisations allowing people to smoke will have to cough up fines as high as Rs 10,000. ‘About 10 million children under the age of 15 are addicted to tobacco in India, with 5,500 starting tobacco use every day. Before they realise its dangers, they get addicted to it,” says Ramadoss.

Graphic warnings with pictures of diseased lungs and dying babies on cigarette and tobacco packs were intended to do just that, but will now be muted down. A high-level Group of Ministers including Pranab Mukherjee, Priyaranjan Das Munsi, Oscar Fernandes, Kamal Nath, Jaipal Reddy and Ramadoss set up to examine the “merits and demerits” of pictorial warnings found them to be “inappropriate.”

 “The tobacco industry needs new consumers and heavily market to the youth, with 10 per cent Mumbai schoolchildren reporting they were offered free tobacco samples and 20 per cent saying they owned a tobacco brand,” says Dr Prakash C. Gupa, Director of the Mumbai-based Healis-Sekhsaria Institute for Public Health.

One in five adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 years consume some form of tobacco in India, with 15. 6 per cent of them smoking cigarettes.

Dilip Kumar, one of the best Indian actors ever is the most appropriate answer to how global is Bollywood. An Afghan son born in Pakistan who studded the Bollywood with gem of movies like Aan, Awaaz, Andaz, Devdas, Mughal-e-Azam etc and even became a member of the Indian Parliament.

Such was the acting caliber of this giant of the Indian film industry that he outperformed his peers in all sort of roles, be it an intense one, or dramatic, romantic, social or even comedy. But, he will always be remembered as the “Tragedy King” of Bollywood as those were the roles which always made people adore him. Rightly, he went on to become the first Indian actor to be awarded with the Filmfare best actor award. He also reserves the honors for having won the same award for the most number of times.

The global portfolio of Dilip Kumar does not end at just Bollywood. He had his first tryst with international fame when a British director offered him a role in his movie “Lawrence of Arabia” in 1962 but the actor refused the offer. Two of his classics “Mughal-e-Azam” and “Naya Daur” were colorized and re-released in 2004 and 2007 respectively.

Dilip Kumar was a great humanitarian as well and has worked for the poor and helped build bridges to overcome the cultural and communal gaps between India and Pakistan. For those efforts of his, he had been awarded the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 1994 and the Nishan-e-Imtiaz in 1998. The latter being the highest civilian award conferred by the government of Pakistan which he asked to return during Kargil war.

It has been hardly a few days since Ratan Tata unveiled the Nano; and already we are looking at Indian roads differently. Regardless of whether the world’s cheapest four-wheeler shifts the paradigm of car owners in this country or not, to not consider the vast amount of catch-up the Indian-State has to play with the booming auto industry regarding road infrastructure is missing the large chunk of composite picture.

 There are multiple points of debate about cars and their growing numbers among various Sections of India’s purchasing society. The issue of the availability of automobile mobility to all, through economic-R&D breakthroughs such as the Nano, is being compared to the manner in which Volkswagen became the real German people’s car in the 1930s. The Volkswagen slogan, “Save five marks a week, if you want to drive your own car,” can be replicated with similar success in this country with more cheap cars on the horizon.

But to turn that old analogy around, having a rising number of cars - whether it’s a Nano or a Ferrari - along roads that woefully fall short in number or quality is like having an expensive computer downloading information from the internet on a narrow, jumpy bandwidth. In other words, taking the German example again, without the autobahn construction spree in the 1930s, the Volkswagen revolution would have been pointless.

India has a tremendous shortage of road transportation - and by that, one means all kinds that include buses, taxis, two-wheelers, not to mention individual owned cars. To consider that the arrival of cheap cars will override the problem of a State sleeping on its duty to provide transportable roads will be a mistake.

Grand projects like the Golden Quadrilateral expressway joining metros is one thing (never mind that there is a growing gap between what is completed on paper to or what is completed on the ground). The real issue lies in how roads form arterial connectivity within our cities and towns. Building flyovers, which have almost come a political fad, can’t be the end all and be all. Roads that connect somewhere to somewhere, on a micro- to macro-level, is the need of the hour, especially with a vast new section of Indians looking at car travel.

It would be indeed elitist to deny the pleasures and the practicalities of the individual-owned four-wheeler to people who can afford only the ‘Rs 1 lakh’ car. But at the same time, space is limited and there is no point putting the ‘horse’n'cart’ before the road that it is to travel on.

As we get tremendously excited with a new batch of car-owners hitting the road, let us not forget that India is in dire need of vast up gradation in public transport systems. Constructing and maintaining roads are still the duty of the State, especially so in a ’socialistic’ nation. To blame private companies for congestion is to take the easy way out. As the bard from the country where cars are not only a driving force of the economy but also of culture said, “Your old road is rapidly agin’/ Please get out of the new one/ If you can’t lend your hand/For the times they are a-changin’.