Calcutta, March 5 :     The tendrils of wispy smoke used to get into Abhimanyu's eyes, making them smart. Inhaling the stream of passive smoke from his father's cigarette, the 20-year-old coughed, spluttered, felt out of breath. Not any more. Abhimanyu ('Only one of my friends smoke') has made his father give up. So has 15-year-old Aparajita. Industry figures indicate that Abhimanyu and Aparajita are not isolated cases even as tobacco multinationals - Philip Morris, Rothmans, BAT - line up investments in India. The shrill anti-smoking campaign in the West has made such companies look to the third world. But the smoke signals from India must be worrying them. Sales of the tobacco giant ITC started slowing down from 1996-97 when the growth in consumption fell to less than 12 per cent. Last year, the growth rate plunged to less than half a per cent. A memorandum presented to the government by the Tobacco Institute of India shows that consumption had actually fallen by four per cent during April-December 1998. During this period, the country's top three cigarette makers - ITC, Godfrey Phillips and Vazir Sultan Tobacco - despatched only 68.80 billion sticks compared to 71.55 billion in the previous corresponding period. The three companies account for 95 per cent of domestic cigarette sales. The size of the tobacco market in India is estimated at Rs 25,000 crore annually. At around Rs 8,000 crore, cigarettes constitute about 33 per cent of the market, slightly less than the market for bidis. In recent years, though, the real gainers are said to be the makers of chewing tobacco: gutka brands boasted a combined sales revenue of Rs 500 crore last year. Industry sources say price is the biggest deterrent for the decline in cigarette sales. Statistically, the 15-35 age group accounts for the highest consumption of cigarettes the world over. But teenagers are kicking the habit because they can dip into their father's pockets for just so much. The cigarette lobby plays down the impact of the anti-smoking campaign. 'Even in Singapore, where smoking is banned in offices and most public places, cigarette sales are going up. The slide in sales in India is influenced mainly by the constantly increasing prices of sticks guided by heavy incidence of excise duty,' an ITC source said. Suddenly, the Marlboro man is no longer a teenagers' role model. Suddenly, in the confines of the college canteen or the crowded dance floors of a city disco, smoking is no longer cool. So what is? 'Careers, gyms, health freaks,' says Royden D'Souza, a second year BA student of St. Xavier's College. 'It is actually the girlfriends,' says Swapan Dinda, owner of the cigarette shop on the ground floor of the Coffee House on College Street. 'They force their partners to give up,' he says malevolently. Take a stroll around the campuses and you will notice hardly any cigarette shops around. Apart from a solitary shop, the ones around St. Xavier's College have packed up. Pramode Swaya - who has been running the Presidency College canteen for nearly the last couple of decades - speaks of a reduction in the number of smokers. The man who owns the corner shop - and who has been hit the hardest by the downward spiral in smoking - blames it on Bollywood. 'In our youth, we saw Pran and Ajit smoking on screen. But just look at the films these days,' says Md. Alam, who runs a cigarette shop on Short Street. Well, just look at them. Titanic, its dream run notwithstanding, had been panned by anti-smoking lobbies for showing Kate Winslet and Leonardo Di Caprio as smokers. Forget Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca or Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The smouldering cigarette - as a come-on, as a symbol of simmering passion or plain rebellion is pass?. Welcome to love in the time of sanitised sensuality. (With inputs by Kausik Datta)