If you’re ever in New Delhi and think you hear a monkey, don’t assume it’s a monkey. It could be a professional monkey noise impersonator.
That’s because humans have been trained to imitate the guttural grunts and shrieks of gray langurs, a type of large monkey that can scare away the smaller kinds that tend to invade city officials’ residences or disrupt state visits.
This weekend, the impersonators will take on a fresh challenge: keeping monkeys, which often evade guards by swinging through tree canopies, from barging into venues for the Group of 20 summit of world leaders, the first to take place in India.
The event is an important one for India on the global stage, and the government does not want monkeys to steal the spotlight.
“We are trying everything to keep the monkeys away,” Satish Upadhyay, vice chairman of the New Delhi Municipal Council, said in an interview. The campaign includes training 40 people to imitate langur noises and placing life-size cutouts of the animals, which can weigh more than 30 pounds, around the venues.
Every place has its unique challenges in hosting a large and prestigious event. Gatherings like the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto and the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle were disrupted by protests. Before their turns hosting the Olympics, Beijing, Paris and Salt Lake City tried to hide poor and homeless residents.
New Delhi, too, faces problems including air pollution and its reputation as a city that is unsafe for women. Amid India’s G20 promotional blitz, advocates say the city’s poor have been hidden away.
And then there are the wild monkeys, mainly rhesus macaques.
They are not shy. They steal food and chase pedestrians. They sometimes ride buses and subway trains. They have attacked patients inside hospitals, invaded the Defense Ministry and the prime minister’s office and romped in the Indian Parliament building.
Such antics occasionally have deadly consequences. In an extreme case, a deputy mayor died in 2007 after falling from his balcony while trying to scare away monkeys by using a stick.
“The monkeys are naughty and they can arrive at your dinner table, in any house in Delhi,” said Abdul Khan, a freelance monkey noise imitator in New Delhi, whose uncle once used live monkeys to shoo smaller ones. “It doesn’t matter how many security guards you have outside the gate.”
A number of Indian and overseas news outlets kicked off their coverage of the G20 last week with reports on the government’s plans for scaring off the macaques. Manisha Pande, the managing editor at Newslaundry, an Indian media watchdog, said such coverage was “as clichéd as it gets” and that many Indians were “quite bored of the foreign press regurgitating the same monkey story.”
She said she could not recall any event or summit in the country ever being disrupted by monkeys.
“That said, monkeys are known to be a bit of an urban menace when it comes to Delhi and many other cities of South…
2023-09-07 12:53:28
Link from www.nytimes.com
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