[First off -- oof, sorry for the big intermission in posting. Hopefully, I will continue to post regularly. No big promises, though.]
Jesse may have been referring to this article in The New York Times last year. Since those incidents, however, I think Delhi has dealt -- by what means, I don't know -- with the problem. In any case, I saw fewer monkeys in Delhi than I saw in most other places. There was a huge group of monkeys that seemed to be filing non-stop out of an abandoned building in North Delhi, but otherwise a monkeyless Delhi.
I saw the most monkeys in the state of Karnataka in South India: at the botanical gardens in Bangalore, on the top of Nandi Hills (about 45 minutes from Bangalore), around the former capital of Mysore and in the ancient ruins of Hampi. This is not to say that there are more monkeys in the South than in the North -- I just visited more monkeyish places in the South.
The effect probably wears off after living around monkeys for awhile, but I was in awe of how (perhaps unsurprisingly) human they look and act. (Or is it the other way around?) The humanoid faces and the opposable thumbs really do the trick. Social situations, like when you see one monkey grooming lice from the hair of another, are eerie.
Usually we kept to ourselves -- the monkeys in the trees or on building exteriors, and me with two feet on the ground. But in some places, like Mysore or the Bangalore botanical gardens, with bolder monkeys, there was more intra-primate interaction. Sometimes the monkeys-cum-space-invaders try to pry a bag of chips out of human hands. More often, however, they just hold out an open palm.
I'll leave you with this photograph, of a Delhi monkey doing its best "Blue Steel" impression:
