How bad monkeys from the towns are corrupting good monkeys that live in the hills

Monkey lovers will say, that it’s the city’s people that have made them behave thus: by feeding and stoning them in turn, they have made the monkeys insecure as to how to respond and behave. By trapping them and sending them off to exile to the Asola Wildlife Sanctuary or some such godforsaken wilderness, we break up closely-knit family groups and that’s quite traumatic for them. Besides, there they would have to behave like primitive hunter-gatherers, can you imagine, not 21st-century millennium macaques that would like to saunter about in air-conditioned malls, helping themselves to cheesecake and cappuccinos. If you behave in a consistently civilised way with them, they will reciprocate and not waylay you, but will ask politely if you have any pistachios to spare… do turn out your pockets and empty your handbag please… right now… or else!

The problem is that the macaques also have pretty short and extremely incendiary fuses: if you don’t give them what they want in about 15 seconds well, you’re asking for trouble, bro. And that can be pretty serious trouble if they gang up against you – a deputy mayor in Delhi paid with his life after being chased off a rooftop by them. Their canines are more suited to sabre-toothed tigers rather than vegetarian simians. Delhi apart, many towns especially in north India, like Agra, Mathura and Dehradun, are dealing with the same problem, and the macaques can truly behave like thugs who have heavy political backing. On a visit to Rishikesh, I was immediately advised to pocket my mobile and remove my spectacles, because they would be immediately snatched and held for ransom by the marauding monkeys. If you wore a gold chain, you might even have your throat slit.

Apparently, many of these hoodlum monkeys are still being trapped by the municipalities, and in the dead of night transported by the truckload to the hills where they are released in the surrounding forests. Most of these hoodlum monkeys are not able to cadge lifts back to the towns they were brought from – as apparently they did in the good old days.

Ah, rehabilitation back into the wild you would say, how nice! But this has not gone down well with either the monkeys or the local human inhabitants of these salubrious places: The locals say that these city-raised monkeys have no ‘tameez’ (respect) for anyone, they indiscriminately destroy their orchards and crops, bite women and children, and in general behave just the way the ‘badtameez’ people of the plains do, whose crimes may be different: littering, buying up land, building hideous resorts and completely upsetting their gentle languorous way of life. Indeed many who have farmed land bordering these forested areas, have given up and been forced to hike down to the dusty towns in the plains in search of livelihoods. The hill people have for long regarded their plains-dwelling counterparts, with suspicion and hostility – not entirely unfounded. They fear these uncivilised, rude people are after their properties and have even accused them of deliberately setting the goonda monkeys loose on them to facilitate the process – just as debt-collectors set heavies after loan defaulters.

What is worse is that now these hoodlum townie monkeys are also corrupting the local population of ‘good’ monkeys who were gentler and got along with the local human population just fine. Talk about holding up a mirror to ourselves.

So how does one deal with this issue? We can’t shoot the monkeys or let leopards loose in the parks, langurs don’t scare them very much (or else they just wait for the langur-patrol to pass before it’s business as usual) and using catapults against them, means that they will, gang up against you. Perhaps, the thing to do is to stop hosting papaya and parantha parties for them every morning in parks and gardens, as so many people do, fattening them up and encouraging them to have more babies because their future is so secure here. Feeding animals is all very well, but with animals as intelligent as the rhesus can you imagine the Whatsapp messages being sent from a hip Delhi-based simian to its country-bumpkin cousin:

Arre Budhoo,

Scoffed big basket of kiwi, (imported), avocado (imported), blueberries (imported), and aloo-paranthe (local) for breakfast – as much as I could eat! Going for a swim now! Too jhatt se aa ja! This is the place to be! Chased 6 year-old bachchas and their mummijis all over the India Gate lawn – bahut mazza aayaa! Am going to visit the new Parliament House soon and see what I can do there. Ek dum jaldi aa bro aur family ko bhi lay aana!

Hatta-katta.