“Achoo!” The loud elephant sneeze frightened all the forest animals and sent them shrieking around with fear. But all those noises were drowned in the chorus of mega sneezes that followed the first. 

“Run, everyone! Run!” the big matriarch elephant commanded. “Run to the pond and dip yourselves in the water!”

It was almost an hour later that there was some silence. The sneezing had stopped and the elephants had washed their itchy bodies and powdered it well with mud.
“Last week we got such tasty sugarcanes in the same place,” mused one young, hungry elephant, “Why it did happen like this today grandma?”

As the oldest and most experienced member of the herd the grand old lady was expected to know about all the dangers. But even she did not understand what could have caused so much itching and sneezing that day.
In a small village on the outskirts of the forest there was jubilation. “It worked! It worked!” the villagers were shouting and dancing with joy.

“God bless those scientists who taught us this easy trick and saved us from danger and sin!” said an elder invoking a blessing in his native Assamese. 

To understand the connection between the two events, we need to go back in time, to the period when the Asian elephants roamed the Earth freely, from Iraq to China and the African elephant had the entire continent to graze. Over the centuries, human population and human settlements increased. The forests began to shrink and the roaming herds were forced to stay within smaller and smaller areas. But over the last one hundred years, the hunger of humans for land jumped many folds and the selfish Homo-sapiens encroached more and more into the lands that rightly belonged to the animals. While most animals helplessly suffered the loss of habitat, the elephants, confident of their strength, dared to retaliate. They started to come out of the forests in gangs and help themselves to the fully grown crops.

Clashes between the animals and humans ensued. Initially the humans tried to drive away the elephants with sticks and loud noises. These were ineffective and resulted in many human casualties. But the figures turned after villagers, desperate for protection, started to electrify the fences around their fields.   
Now the elephants were dying in alarming numbers.

Pushed to find a new way to keep the elephants off human lands, the wild life authorities, the world over, have been carrying out various experiments. Recently, experimenters in Kenya found that 'chilli grease', when applied to rope barriers encircling farms completely deterred elephants.

The idea was quickly imported by the wildlife experts in Assam who are now teaching the locals to use the 'bhut jolokia' effectively. Bhut jolokia, as you may have read, is native to the NE India and is the world's hottest chili.
Additionally, farmers make 'smoke bombs' by filling balls of straw with the pungent dry chili. These are attached to sticks and set fire. The fire ball emits a strong pungent smell that effectively drives away the elephants. (Now you know why the elephants at the beginning of the story were sneezing!)

A veteran forest department official, however, warned that elephants were “intelligent mammals” and capable of quickly figuring out “solutions to their problems”. In some places where the fences had been electrified, elephants have been seen to pull out the poles and cause the entire system to collapse!

So till grandma elephant figures out a way to counter the chillies, villagers can rest in peace that they had at last found a cheap and non-lethal way of defending themselves from the giants.