They have to be reckoned with. They got the power. It’s not for nothing that the Hindus got Hanuman, the monkey god, to look to in times of distress. The ancient sages were no fools to have him in the pantheon, a status that evokes the greatest of respect. Think of him and all the unknown fears of the evil forces are supposed to vanish.

The Panchsheel mode has been the factor for the unusual co-existence of the simians and the humans. The ancient wisdom had the right balance for the ecology sprouting from the realisation that Planet Earth belonged to all living beings irrespective of their development as visualised by us, the humans with that illogical facade of the superiority complex. It seems we had our day to celebrate. The grim reality is looming

right in front with the ‘whats’ of global warming and climate change. Slowly, the turn of thought of the so-called rational beings is taking place, albeit the massive rock chunk blocks the tunnel exit.

More than the thoughts of the self, a few have turned up in the streets, and the cyber space to come up with the required decibel of sound energy to speak on behalf of all the living things or, if you believe, on all of God’s creations. In the scheme, the monkeys too fit in and that too in a big way.

Let’s go for the insight part. They, possibly the medical scientists, tell us of the immense value of the swingers of the trees. Yes, the primates seem to share the same pool of genes. This finding is what has endangered whatever are left of them in the wild, forget about the few in and around some places of worship. With the trees making a receding stand in front of the supposed destruction-oriented ingenuity of man, our nearest relatives seem to be right at the edge of the precipice. A small shove and they would be out of the scene like the dinosaurs.

You might wonder why the talk has come about at the moment. The knowledgeable, not the monkeys, know of the wads of greenbacks that some have

been collecting over the years by sending our dear animal relatives for a spine-chilling foreign visit never to return again.

The real monkeys can not fight the dangerous masked monkeys that we are. Maybe, a call to Hanuman might work.