Monkey Chants

Until the recent ODI series between India and Australia, I had no idea that taunting someone with monkey noises constituted racial abuse. I'd always believed that equating someone to a monkey amounted to personal insult, and little else. Why, I've been called a monkey many a time myself. And in turn, I have, on more than one occasion, called someone a damned dirty ape. Never once did either party accuse the other of racial abuse. One may, of course, at this point argue that a 'damned dirty ape' is technically speaking, an ape and not a monkey, but I shall safely ignore that for the sake of this argument.

One cannot ignore, however, the monkey chants that have been going on through this series. Unless, of course, one is the BCCI president, in which case, one can issue the following statement:

I believe this is a misunderstanding; a language issue. There are many languages spoken in India, and I don't understand many of them myself.

Which begs the question, which one of the languages spoken in India does Mr. Pawar believe to be phonetically similar to monkey noises?

Whatever the case - whether these incidents were racially motivated, or a linguistics issue, or simply a case of some spectators monkeying around - we may never know. To me, however, the case for racial abuse seems particularly strong, simply because it was Andrew Symonds who was the object of these taunts. If it were Ricky Ponting, it would have been understandable, he does look like a chimp. Or even Adam Gilchrist for that matter. But Symonds doesn't look like a monkey at all. Not a bit. In fact, he looks rather disturbingly like the alien from those Predator movies. You know what I'm talking about. and if you don't, here is photographic evidence to help you see the point. The chap on the left is Andrew Symonds.

[Yes, this is another monkey related post. And no, I don't think there have been enough of them already.]