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Krish Ashok

2 Oct, 23 tweets, 4 min read

I’ve done my fair share of business negotiations, but nothing could have prepared me to parlay with a thuggish rhesus monkey who stole my spectacles at the Jakhoo temple in Shimla earlier today. I was, rather fortuitously, helped by an imposing alpha male monkey

If you are wondering how on earth I managed to enlist the services of a large monkey to retrieve my spectacles, I will have to tell you the whole story, but since I’m currently trekking to see the Chadwick falls, this will have to wait till my phone gets connectivity

It all started with this guy. More precisely, because I was not able to reach this guy. Vodafone’s service in Shimla is best described as the exact opposite of the Shammi Kapoor song “bar bar dekho” because no bars are to be seen in most parts of the city.

Also, the guy who gave me the Shimla Horse Guy contact didn’t know his name either, and merely told me that he arranges for horse rides and cabs, and I already had 20 “Shimla Cab guy” contacts, so “horse guy” seemed like a better primary key.

In the absence of Shimla horse guy, I decided to step up and play the guide role because unlike my wife and kid, I have visited Shimla several times in the past, and more crucially, have encountered the uniquely recidivist monkeys at the Jakhoo temple

So I advised my wife to avoid shawls, handbags and in general, any visibly loose object that can be purloined by those simians. But I forgot the one loose object whose absence renders me functionally blind - my spectacles

The climb was uneventful, but during our descent, we encountered what seemed like a middle-of-the-pathway beauty salon cum snack bar. Monkeys were busy removing lice from other monkeys and snacking on them.

As we walked past them, one of the groomers left his customer and slowly started tailing me. I strode ahead confident of my anti-monkey preparations. That was when he attained escape velocity

In one smooth motion, he leapt onto my shoulder, swiped my glasses and jumped onto the branch of a 100 ft tall Deodar and proceeded to give me a “Now negotiations may begin” look. He also started chewing on my spectacles in a vain attempt to extract calories from them.

I am assuming that was the look because, as I had indicated earlier, I am functionally blind without my spectacles. At this point, some locals arrived and told me that negotiations with North Korea tend to require some very specific confidence building measures

And these CBMs involved the procurement of “Prasad” from a nearby store. This would be our bargaining chip during hostage negotiations.

And again, since I was functionally blind, I dispatched my wife to the store to procure aforementioned “Prasad”. She did, and then roughly 20 metres before she reached me, another band of monkeys politely stopped her

Like official robberies in Ankh-Morpork, the monkeys proceeded to separate my wife from the prasad that was to be my bargaining chip in my negotiations with spectacle robber monkey, who was, by now, not too pleased with the delay in negotiations.

So plan A failed and there was really no plan B. I briefly attempted to exchange my face mask for my spectacles, but the monkey (again, functionally blind, so it’s a guess) gave me a “who do you take me for, punk” expression.

That was when some good samaritans arrived, on their way up to the temple, and they had prasad with them. They offered to try and negotiate with spectacle robber monkey.

They threw a packet his way, and he grabbed it, with my spectacles still in his mouth. Like failed states and world bank loans, he made no attempt to return my spectacles. He also climbed to a higher perch. Clearly, he was aiming for a larger ransom amount

I was about to resign myself to a spectacle-free, blurry vacation. That was when an ultra-massive alpha male monkey arrived on the scene.

Now this guy looked like someone who, unlike gym bros in India who only do bench presses and end up with spindly calves, was completely ripped. Even his muscles had their own muscles

Alpha male gym bro monkey leapt on spectacle robber monkey, who dropped both spectacles and prasad and fled from the scene. Alpha male monkey proceeded to dispatch glucose to his muscles

My surmise is that the big alpha males don’t bother to do all the hard work of holding valuable human artifacts to ransom and earning high calorie prasad in exchange. Robber barons don’t do the dirty job of robbing.