• 1/25/2005
  • Mumbai, India
  • Prachi Jatania
  • Mumbai Newsline (cities.expressindia.com)

A small, cramped office room at Bandra Reclamation. This is the war room for their ideas, which interestingly are a tad older than the thinkers themselves.

The six of them, just out of college, can debate rock stars and oral cancer in the same afternoon, at an age when you usually discuss either rock stars or oral cancer—not both. Their mission—to stop the non-smoker from taking that first puff.

‘‘Cigarette companies need 4,000 new smokers everyday,’’ they rattle off. The group, with an average age of 20, met at the Bandra event management insitute where they study. And their big project right now is a rock concert they’re organising to spread the word.

‘‘Rock bands are usually associated with drugs and cigarettes, which the young blindly emulate. We thought why not use rock to say something positive,’’ says bespectacled Siddharth Jain aka ‘Squid’, the software whiz of the group. It all began with a college project that spiralled into a serious need to do “something constructive’’.

The outcome was SWAT (Students Working Against Tobacco), which took off in October 2004, with a dozen additional members who felt the same way about tobacco. SWAT now has 30 full-time members and centres in Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune. The core group focuses on college contact programmes where they make presentations and enact plays on the benefits of ‘‘staying off smoking’’.

And the presentations are not amateur attempts at communication—they carry endorsements from youth icons like cricketer Rahul Dravid, singer Sunidhi Chauhan and biotechnology czarina Kiran Mazumdar Shaw.

Juggling classes with daily SWAT meetings can be tricky, but the cause generates its own rush. ‘‘For now, our life revolves around this,’’ beams Subhashini Balasubrananian.

While the crusaders stay focussed on the direction they are headed in, they know they can get lost in the noise. ‘‘There are loads of campaigns, but they’ve only slammed its ill-effects,’’ says Jain. SWAT shows the bright side of not starting in the first place.

And they’re taking it one small step at a time. For now, a comfortable lounge area and a coffee machine in their makeshift office are a priority.