Sunday, July 22, 2007

Monkey see, monkey screwed!!


[The verifiability of this story is strongly suspect so I advise readers to take it with tablespoons of salt. The source of this story was a certain gentleman named Mr. Malladi Srinath and it is a story worth telling for sheer entertainment value, whether it be true or not]

We had just moved into single rooms at the start of our pre-final year and Hostel No. 5 was our spanking new home with shiny new toilets (In one of the three blocks only, of course the remaining two perenially under construction for the remainder of the semester). It was then on a hot weekend day, that a lost little monkey wandered into the premises of the hostel. The presence of an actual animal in a place that had till then seen only animals of the 'drunk' and rolling in the grass kind was naturally quite the event.

The creature may have entered with the hope of furthering simian-human brotherhood but its intentions were surely put on the backburner when it became the instant target for sustained heckling by a hundred odd of the weird species commonly known as 'hostelites'. The terrorized have a way of fighting back and it was only a matter of time before the oppressed became the oppressor. The monkey was a small adversary to overpower, but no guy wanted to have distinctive monkey scars on his face for the rest of his life nor was the prospect of a bite from those tiny but sharp jaws very enticing. So the fella had a romp around the hostel especially A-Block and caused unprecedented events like actually getting the Jamestin twins under one roof though it was only a brief moment of madness and extreme self-defence as the thing invaded Alex's room. In the clinching proof of blood running thicker than water, Felix Jamestin actually offered his twin brother shelter, contrary to all popular expectations.

I am sure that the thrill of accomplishing this revolutionary event was what got to Mr. Monkey's head right then and thereby led him to script his own downfall. Pushing everyone on the backfoot, he decided that it was time for an actual monkey-human hand-to-hand. And woe betide the moment when he chose his opponent from the Homo sapiens sapiens species. Rakesh was his chosen rival and this kind of blindness in judging his capabilities cannot be put down to conceit alone! I am sure there are a number of reasons like the one we saw that day, why monkeys lost out to humans in the evolutionary race!

You see it was common opinion that with a tree-trunk like hulking muscle bound body like Rakesh had, it would only be fair to say that here was a superhuman in his benign(and as you will see later not so benign) alter ego of a plain ol' engineering student. But the die was cast and the monkey was quick to spring on his rival. Unfortunately for the monkey, agility was not going to be the deciding factor in this match-up and probably the weights that Rakesh could do with his little fingers would be heavier than the scrawny creature. He was literally punched to the ground, stopping in mid-air to reverse direction and to head for ground twice as fast as he had jumped off it. And to add insult to injury, as the creature lay writhing on the ground he was dispatched even further with a sharp kick from our aforesaid body-builder. Maneka Gandhi may be up in arms post this article, but the truth is , that day Rakesh did his bit to enhance humanity's security from its wilder cousins.

No more monkeying around then for our most ungraciously welcomed guest. He was off in a flash away from all those crazy humans up into the safety of the trees with whatever remained of his bones. I am pretty certain that for generations of monkeys in and around Kurukshetra, this was a lesson hard learnt. "Wild as us they may be and hooping noises they may emit every Friday night when they herd together over some strangely coloured water, but never ever make that cardinal mistake of trying to extend our monkey brotherhood to those strange creatures that inhabit the hostels."