The curtain is finally down on the World No Tobacco Day 2017 and we are back to business as usual. There was a flurry of activities in my city, and elsewhere too, during the weeks preceding this day, reaching a crescendo on the 30th and 31st of May. Barring very few exceptions, the script of all the programmes/ discourses seemed to be taken from the same master copy.

There is no doubt that groundbreaking progress has been made in fight against tuberculosis (TB) in the past two decades, but it might be prudent to review if we are winning the fight in order to #endTB by 2030. Do we slip backwards when we fail to prevent every single transmission of new TB infection or when a new person becomes resistant to anti-TB drugs?

 My first personal brush with the severity of asthma was several years ago, when one of my students suddenly started gasping for breath in the middle of her Physics Practical final examination of Class 12. We were clueless about the cause of her sudden affliction. Other than making her sit in the open air and force her to drink water, we did not know what to do.