Ransom-Demanding Monkeys Trade Juice Boxes and Samosas for Visitors' Belongings
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Today on State of the World, the Indian holy town overrun by ransom-demanding monkeys.

You're listening to State of the World from NPR, the day's most vital international stories, up close where they are happening. I'm Christine Arismith. Now, we're going to the northern Indian town of Vrindavan. There, it can be dangerous just to wear glasses because bold, thieving monkeys will take them hostage in exchange for juice. Your favorite is mango. Reporter Omkar Khandekar takes us there.

Outside a Hindu temple packed with pilgrims and rickshaws, Vinod Verma says he just got robbed. He says a monkey climbed on his shoulder and swiped his glasses off his face. One kid here has seen all this before. Krishna.

He's 12, skinny and is turning a profit from this monkey business. Krishna says he dashed over, whipped out two boxes of super sweet mango juice and hurled them at the monkey. The monkey caught the boxes and dropped the glasses. Parma tipped Krishna about a dollar.

Krishna says he makes between $6 to $12 a day through such hostage negotiations. He says he even helped someone for free yesterday because they did not have money. After all, there'll always be a next time. Vrindavan is full of monkeys, hanging by power lines, sliding off temple canopies, even breaking into people's kitchens for treats.

It happens so often that town's legislator Hema Malini brought it up in the Indian parliament a few years ago. She said pilgrims feed them junk food like samosas and juice boxes. Now monkeys are getting sick. Millions of pilgrims visit Vrindavan every year. They believe this town is where the beloved Hindu god Krishna grew up.

John Stratton Hawley, professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, has been visiting the town for the past 50 years, when it was only half the size it is now. It used to be a place where you could go so as to be able to walk in the very footsteps of the Lord Krishna. Back then, pilgrims walked on a dirt path around the town, a Hindu ritual known as Parikrama. They would chant prayers, cross forested woods filled with peacocks and bathe in the nearby Yamuna river.

That's not the city that exists today. People have built temples with towering statues, luxury housing and five-star hotels. Much of the surrounding forest was razed. And there's barely a tree left in the city. Jayadhindo is an urban development expert at the World Resources Institute.

She says Indian cities have been expanding haphazardly over the past three decades. It has led to basically a lot of these places getting built on areas which were ecologically or environmentally sensitive and should not have been built upon. Unlike other animals who retreated or disappeared as the city developed, monkeys made Vrindavan their home.

And across India, there have been reports of leopards entering houses, elephants feasting on farms and crocodiles attacking people on beaches. Rajnikan Mittal heads the Vrindavan's forest department.

He says it's not easy to curb monkey numbers. Traditional techniques may not work in that case because one, it is a prodigal breeder. Second, there is no predator for it. Religious sentiments have also, forgive me here, thrown a monkey wrench into the works. Many here believe monkeys to be an incarnation of the Hindu god Hanuman. And so, despite the nuisance, many residents want the monkeys to stay. Like Madan Kumar Saini.

He runs a sweet shop next to an ancient Hindu temple dedicated to Hanuman. He says monkeys have always been part of the town. We have to put up with them. Other residents are trying to stop monkeys from turning to crime. Kauvind Sharma is a volunteer with the local animal welfare organization Shri Vrindavan Bihari Seva Trust.

We met him on a cool fall morning outside a riverside temple, where he flung fistfuls of cucumbers on the ground, prompting dozens of monkeys to scuttle down lamp posts and drainage pipes to feast. Because, he says, monkeys don't attack people if they are not hungry. Their thieving behaviour is a result of human actions. Monkeys shouldn't be punished for it.

Omkar Khandekar, NPR News, Vrindavan, India. That's the state of the world from NPR.

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