Monkeying around with outsourcing

We outsource plenty of tasks to India, but India apparently doesn’t have an India to outsource to just yet. But following a variation of the old saw that one should never send a boy to do a man’s job, the Indians have decided that you should never send a man to do a monkey’s job.

So they’re using a squad of langurs to augment the 100,000 security guards they have lined up to protect and defend the upcoming Commonwealth Games, which are being held in New Delhi.

While the human guards will be armed, and their forces will include soldiers using anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles, the monkeys will have to rely on their agility, wits, ferocity, and – if I know my monkeys – ability to hurl feces to get the job done. (By the way: ack-ack guns and SAMs? Sounds like a lot o’ fun.)

The citizen-monkeys who’ve been conscripted are Hanuman langurs. They’ve:

…already taken up positions around two stadiums in the city, charged with defending athletes and spectators from attacks by smaller, wild monkeys. (Source: NY Times Lede Blog.)

I wonder who gave the gung-ho speech to the langurs?  I’m thinking that Ike’s pre-D-Day message to the troops may not have been all that effective.

Remember the Alamo? Remember the Maine? Remember the San Diego Zoo?

But monkeys are smart, and they do get sign language, so maybe that’s how they received their charge.

And they do respond to bribes. Maybe they were they all issued M&M’s instead of MRE’s.

Reuters was the ur source for the monkey info.

"We have deployed 38 langurs and it is a very effective way to scare away the common monkeys," NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Council) spokesman Anand Tiwari told Reuters on Wednesday.

Ah, those darned common monkeys!  Lest you think this is amusing, a few years back a posse of them attacked the deputy mayor, who was driven off the terrace he was standing on and plunged to his death.

Fortunately for the NDMC, they don’t have to take the langurs on permanently, swelling the council payrolls. Instead, they are able to bring them on for hire.

"We take these langurs on rent. Their trainers accompany them and once the assignment is over, they return home," he added.

As we all know, everyone ends up a consultant at one point or another.

Langurs, by the way, have long experience as guard simians, having been used in office buildings for years. I always say, go with the pros.

These few, these happy few, this band of langurs are specialists: they do monkeys.

To contend with the other four-legged concern of The Games -  the number of rats - NDMC hasn’t hired a bunch of ratters. So, no kitty-cats need apply. They’re using traps and 100 kg of rat-killer.

Then there’s the dengue fever from the mosquitoes in the stagnant pools.

…organisers [sic: this is Reuters] released mosquito-eating fish in the water at the Games Village and are carrying out daily fogging there.

Wonder if the mosquito-eating fish were outsourced, too? And maybe deploying cats as ratters would have presented a problem with respect to the mosquito-eating fish. (As Sylvester used to say to Tweety: Hello, breakfast. And, yes, I know that Tweety was a bird not a fish.)

Meanwhile, killer monkeys. Rampant rats. And dengue-fever carrying mosquitoes.

Can’t say I’m sorry that I took yet another pass on the Commonwealth Games.

They may be worth you life, but let the games begin!

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Happy Birthday, Kath!