PiggyBank小豬銀行

In India monkey business takes on a whole new meaning. Hanuman langurs are trained in New Delhi to scare off aggressive rhesus monkeys and other wild animals that might roam into public spaces and cause mischief. When the city hosted the 2010 Commonwealth Games last October, its municipal council used 38 langurs to help with critter control.

These primates are valued as more than security guards. Hindus revere them as a symbol of the monkey deity Hanuman, whose simian army helped rescue Sita, the god Rama’s wife, from a demon king, according to a Sanskrit epic. Langurs’ black faces and extremities call to mind the burns that Hanuman suffered in the course of his heroism.

The lifestyle of the monkeys reflects this state of grace. In the city of Jodhpur, at the edge of the Thar, or Great Indian, Desert, some 2,100 wild langurs regularly leap into human society to sample its goods. Local Hindus share picnics in parks and turn shrines into buffets of offerings for the monkeys. Some let the holy beasts glean from their gardens.

That’s a nice change of pace from life in the Thar, where sizzling heat and scant moisture make survival a challenge, and the monkeys must scrounge for plants and occasional insects to eat. Since most langurs are tree dwellers, these often scamper high on the desert cliffs or perch on nearby rooftops.

But the human population is growing fast in the region these days, and people may be tempted to retaliate if the monkeys’ garden incursions turn into full-fledged crop raids. Even animals this beloved could wear out their welcome.

It was a generation in waiting. They waited for a good education, and that rarely came. Then they waited for jobs, which paid very little when they did come. Without proper jobs, they waited to get married, often staying with their parents into their 30’s – or living with their parents even after they got married. Most important, they waited for liberty: the right to vote freely, to participate in politics, to change the world.

Until they could wait no longer.

Some 60 percent of people in the Middle East are under 30 years old, and many of them are angry. Like young people everywhere, they have ambitions. They want, they need, they crave. They feel constrained – especially, perhaps, when they watched satellite television or surf the internet. There they can see how the rest of the world lives. Social media (including personal blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more) allow young men and women to share their frustrations in ways they couldn’t in the past. They are not alone any more. Now they have allies. They have power.