Isn't Monad just a syntactic sugar?

Question

I have been through various papers/articles/blogs and what not about Monads. People talk about them in various context like category theory (what in world is that?) etc. After going through all this and trying to really understand and write monadic code, I came to the understanding that monads are just syntactic sugar (probably the most glorified of them all). Whether it is do notation in Haskell or the Computation Expressions in F# or even the LINQ select many operator (remember LINQ syntax is also a syntactic sugar in C#/VB).

My question is if anyone believe monads are more then syntactic sugar (over nested method calls) then please enlighten me with "practicality" rather than "theoretical concepts".

Thanks all.

UPDATE:

After going through all the answers I came to the conclusion that implementation of monad concept in a particular language is driven through a syntactic sugar BUT monad concept in itself is not related to syntactic sugar and is very general or abstract concept. Thanks every body for the answer to make the difference clear between the concept itself and the ways it is being implemented in languages.

Answer 1

Monad aren't syntactic sugar; Haskell has some sugar for dealing with monads, but you can use them without the sugar and operators. So, Haskell doesn't really 'support' monads any more than loads of other languages, just makes them easier to use and implement. A monad isn't a programming construct, or a language feature as such; it's an abstracted way of thinking about certain types of objects, which, when intuited as Haskell types, provide a nice way of thinking about the transfer of state in types which lets Haskell (or indeed any language, when thought of functionally) do its thing.

Answer 2

do notation, computation expressions and similar language constructs are of course syntactic sugar. This is readily apparent as those constructs are usually defined in terms of what they desugar to. A monad is simply a type that supports certain operations. In Haskell Monad is a typeclass which defines those operations.

So to answer your question: Monad is not a syntactic sugar, it's a type class, however the do notation is syntactic sugar (and of course entirely optional - you can use monads just fine without do notation).