Eight years back Medical News Today reported that Cigarette smoke produces 10 times more air pollution than diesel car exhaust. In one of their experiment, they tried putting three burning filter cigarettes in a closed garage. Later they put an idle running 2 litre diesel engine for thirty minutes in closed garage before opening the windows for four hours and letting the outside air enter in. It were surprising to see that combined particulate levels after the first hour was 88 microgram/cubic meter, where as with the cigarettes, it was 830!

On my way back to India I was taking a solitude stroll in the Helsinki Airport. There were a couple a friends with me, but I decided to sit in one of the un-crowded corners and watch the crowd around. Interestingly there was a glass chamber in front me. It proudly flaunted the words "smoking zone." The only positive side I can find of that was that passive smokers face no threat from the active smokers around them. Suddenly an interesting idea crossed my mind and I took out my notebook and a pen and started observing the numbers of smokers entering and exiting the chamber!

I sat from 17:15 pm to 17:45 pm on 11^th July 2012. I saw the smokers enter, lit a tobacco death-pipe, puff for a minute or two and exit out hurriedly for they seemed very busy or engaged, unlike me at that time who had keen eyes on them.

In the period of that thirty minutes, I saw eighteen smokers entering the smoking premises. Nine of them being males, and rest nine females (actually there were seventeen individuals, but I counted one of the ladies twice since she entered and puffed a cigar twice in that interval of time). I grew a bit concerned. The almost empty looking glass cabin just hosted eighteen smokers in a period of just eighteen hundred seconds!

I quickly did some simple instant mathematical analysis. Suppose this goes for 24 hours round the day then we have 864 smokers! Even if we introduce a negative 16.67% of error we still have 720 smokers a day! Does it sound bothering? May not be at this point of time. Good, keep reading then.

Now considering a non-leap year of 365 days, we have 262800 annual smokers being entertained in that cabin.

Helsinki Airport is not even one of the top 50 airports in the rank-list of "World's busiest airports by passenger traffic" released by Airports Council International. But even if we consider 39 such airports we see that we get more than ten million cigarettes smoked up annually! In other way it means banning smoking completely in the top 40 airports can result in saving at least ten million cigarettes a year! Now this is big!

You see three cigarettes resulted in ten times the pollution of a diesel engine left running for 30 minutes. Now what does ten millions mean? I will tell you this simple mathematics. It means a 2 litre diesel engine left running for more than 190 years! And this really bothers me sometimes...the air pollution, the vehicles, the fossil fuels, the smoking parents...everything. I hope someday in our life we will succeed in making this world a better place...and just now we saw how banning smoking rooms in few airports can make one good difference.