Tuesday

I've been meaning to mention this: last Friday, I got all deposit, service, and equipment charges together and submitted paperwork to have cable internet hooked up in our apartment. The lease said this might take seven days, but the guy at the front desk of our building estimated that the workers could only show up as early as Wednesday. That's tomorrow. Sometime after that there's a good possibility I'll never have to come to Le's Café for anything other than Vietnamese coffee again.* Then I'll be able to more fully illustrate, in words and pictures, those things that have been happening since I moved to this country, necessitating longer and more involved posts. When that begins to happen, this Update Column will get primarily back to its traditional business of relating the interesting local news, announcements, and other short fare it was created to convey. In the spirit of that, here's a sadly wonky news item from the Indian capital of New Delhi, where deputy mayor SS Bajwa, a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, was reading a newspaper on his terrace Friday, October nineteenth when he was attacked by aggressive monkeys. In the process of attempting to evade his beastly assailants, Mr. Bajwa fell over his terrace railing. The deputy mayor was admitted to the intensive care unit of Delhi Hospital, but he eventually died from the fall (on October twenty-second). Conflicts between monkeys and people apparently happen frequently in the capital city, where municipal officials cannot control a population of rapidly habituating animal bands forced to adapt to urbanism after the loss of more natural habitats to industrialization. At the same time, these monkeys are protected by the tenets of monkey god worshipers, serving Hanuman by feeding his decedents near the temples where he is revered. [Cavin]