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Our pal Asylum blog has a fantastic article about how some of the world’s most bizarre riots got started. Like this one in New Delhi, India in 2007, that was caused by … monkeys!
In New Delhi, where monkeys are a touch more revered and tolerated than they would be in most countries, rhesus macaques, numbering over 20,000 in the city, have a history of biting people. They’ve also been known to break into hospitals to pull out I.V. feeding tubes and drink the liquid themselves (because monkeys are diabolical like that). Somewhat more impressive is that the monkeys have a political agenda and actually killed the deputy mayor of New Delhi by pushing him off a balcony.
Unlike most riots, this one was fought the old-fashioned way, with more monkeys. Langurs, which are just bigger monkeys, have been brought into the city and strategically placed around important buildings to scare off the nuisance monkeys. Never has a more awesome solution to a problem been devised.
Check out the article here: 5 Unlikely Reason for Riots – Thanks Alex!
It’s like a modern day version of Captain Ahab’s quest for the white whale Moby Dick. But ickier. A whole lot ickier and much more intriguing.
Sam Miller, BBC’s former South Asia correspondent, has been obsessed with finding a man "whose dexterity and gall [he] admires beyond reason," … the New Delhi Poo Squirter:
I was in Connaught Place, in the heart of New Delhi, and as I emerged from an underpass a shoe-shine man came up to me, and whispered into my ear.
He then pointed at my right shoe on which sat, to my amazement, a small worm of brownish goo. He offered to wipe it off, but I knew that something was, well, afoot, and cleaned my shoe with a few leaves.
Some months later it happened again and I had a minor altercation with the shoe-shine man. Then one day, I decided I would take a photograph of the person who squirted my shoe. But I was daydreaming as I wandered through the underpass and was squirted again.
Link – via Cabinet of Wonders
