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aside a half-eaten fruit or for a passerby to drop a crust of bread.  They
picked through the garbage for gourmet treats--wilted vegetables or
melon rinds.  When the rains came, these pampered langurs stretched
out under the overhangs of roofs.  When it was sunny, they turned
those roofs into a playground.  Getting along from day to day was a
breeze.
The second crew of langurs lived in the hills just outside of town.
Life for them was anything but easy.  They were forced to comb the
ground for edible shoots.  They stripped the greenery off the trees for
dinner, and they dug the occasional insect out of a rotting log for a
protein treat.  When it rained, they huddled miserably under the
dripping leaves.  In the pecking order of local groups, their
superorganism was on the bottom.
Every once in a while, the monkeys from the hills became fed up
with their gritty lot in life.  They came down to the village where the
pickings were easy.  The monkeys of the bazaar, however, were not
particularly interested in opening their neighborhood to these
intruders from the wrong side of the tracks.  The privileged lady
langurs who lived in town got together and chased their
underprivileged cousins back to the woods from which they'd come.
But no social group's position in the pecking order is written in
stone.  One day the male leader of the bazaar langurs was fooling
around with a sidekick in the middle of the town road.  The hill
langurs stood at the edge of their territory, grudgingly watching the
fun.  Suddenly, a car came hurtling down the tarmac.  The lordly male
of the elite group looked up startled--but too late.  The car sideswiped
him and sped away.  The leader of the bazaar troop was dead.
Sensing a sudden shift in the balance of power, the chief of the
hill tribe sauntered over to the aristocratic ladies of the
ever-so-snobbish bazaar set--the same supercilious aristocrats who had
chased him and his companions away an endless number of times.
The hill langur leader donned the simian symbols of authority--an
   members hung around the bazaar, waiting for a small boy to toss
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