Monkey raids a dustbin in IIT Madras hostel.

Doors of the hostel rooms left open invite, not just fellow hostel mates but, a bunch of monkeys in IIT Madras. Amidst the students and faculty, monkeys too seem to be equally a part of the entire grind. From raiding open hostel rooms, dust bins, and even snatching ice creams from student these monkeys have been adept in ensuring variety of food for themselves.

A student trying to protect his food parcel.

Students have been seen carrying huge branches to ward away the monkeys while carrying food parcels. As a matter of fact, seniors in the college even give valuable piece of advice to juniors, not always about academics but also how to protect food stuff from being gobbled up by monkeys. Monkeys in the campus are, however, disciplined. They go looking for food only at select times: 6:00-7:30 a.m. and 5:30-7:00 p.m.; else they stick to wild berries and fruits found in the campus’ trees.

No student has ever been grievously injured, but they do get scared by the monkey troops. They have come up with some interesting ideas, apart from the boring mesh the college has fixed. The ideas include: ensuring no dustbins outside the room (it is always outside the next door ensuring the monkeys create a mess there instead in one’s own room), creating C++ programs to emit frequency of 27 kHz to annoy the monkeys and drive them away, throwing cold water, slippers and anything one can lay their hands on. But the most feasible and popular idea seems to be throwing bananas in the next wing. The logic behind this being that the monkeys will stay away from your hostel but flock to the next wing for the bananas.

Apart from monkeys, IIT M also houses a variety of wildlife. Spotted Deer (in pic)

The IIT Madras Campus was carved out of a natural forest that formed a part of the Guindy National Park. Apart from monkeys, the campus also houses the endangered chital & black buck deer species, jackals, mongooses, squirrels, toddy cats, wild cats, various types of reptiles, a variety of insects which includes about 40 different species of butterflies and about 100 species of birds. The co-existence of the two species, students and the monkeys, is rather interesting. They seem to have constant confrontations, yet have made peace with each other.

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