It had been a very long time since I saw the Nat Geo and Discovery channels. There was one point of time when I used to be really crazy about those.. Wildlife and conservation and the like.. At one point of time all I wanted to do was to live in the jungle like Mowgli. No laughing please. Then somewhere sometime, a lot of *well wishers* drained that idea from my head and here I am. MBA. Any way, no regrets. But I got to make many many friends who also had this 'wildlife-y' streak, and one of them is Ram (www.ramnathshekar.com ). Ram is one of my very good and famously famous friends. And he had worked with Nat Geo on King Cobras, and they made this documentary movie of which he gave me a copy and hence broke my sabbatical. Super. :) It is an excellent movie. Highly recomended, They air it very often on Nat Geo these days, and please do watch it!! (If you are not snake-scared that is). It touched on a lot of issues and one of them was the man-animal conflict. Man encroaches into animal territory, animal is homeless. Animal wants place to stay and food to eat. So it does what it has been doing since it had evolved. Hunt. Only that now, animal has no choice but hunt only available prey- domesticated animals. So man gets wild, and kills the animal, and one fine day, its extinct.There are some movies that get you thinking. This was one. Because, this is one issue that everyone can relate to. Especially everyone at the new SSN ladies hostel. (Strictly no laughing)
Our hostel had no inmates, except, ofcourse, us. And sudenly, on one blessed morning, this family of monkeys came to stay. And trust me; one of them was huge!The Macaca rhesus (right spell?); the ones you find in the temples. Bless them. We never had a problem with them..we kept to ourselves, and so did they. Until one fine day, when they toppled our big blue dustbin, scavenging for food. okay..forgiven. Next, they raided the bathroms. God knows for what joy. They messed up the entire bathroom, toppled those bins, and what not. Forgiven. No damage caused. But it reaced the climax when did the same thing when X* was in one of the loos. She screamed and yelled and cried and brought the roof down. Well who could blame her. She had this super mega size primate-o-phobia. Which has only increased with time. Poor thing. But this was a day before we left for vacations. I have no doubt the watch men would have tried relocating the monkey family by now. But the problem is that relocation almost always never works! They have tried it tim,e and again in Delhi, and in Chennai too, with dogs. But animals accustomed to one environment will will most certainly come back o the same. The only permissible solution is to do the birth control thing to them, so that the adults will not have any progeny, and the blood line will die out. Sadness.
