Skip to main content

When I met Don Quixote




I was thrilled beyond my wits because it is not often that one stumbles upon Don Quixote. 

I greeted him with folded arms first, then shook hands with him before embracing him tight.  Really tight. So tight that he gasped and pushed me away.  “Real love does not display itself so smotheringly,” he managed to speak through the gasps.

I apologised profusely and explained that I couldn’t contain my excitement on seeing him this Sunday morning when the monsoon clouds deceitfully played hide-and-seek in God’s own country.

“Ah, gods and clouds!” He exclaimed. “Never trust either of them. They are part of the world’s madness.”

“You were the sanest, Don,” I could not suppress my admiration of the man who single-mindedly pursued his dreams. 

He laughed heartily.  “Where do you draw the line of sanity, my friend?” 

Millions of people dying of starvation when tonnes of food is wasted due to mismanagement or sheer callousness.  Is that sanity? He asked me.  The farmers who produce your food are committing suicide while those who do nothing but sit with fat account books eat the choicest food cooked by connoisseurs.  Sanity?  He mocked. You use gods to commit mass murders.  Sanity?  He went on to list a whole of sins, both cardinal and venial, that we keep committing while claiming to be protecting our gods and religion, our culture and national pride.

“Too practical, friend, too practical, that’s your madness,” he said like a preacher in the Sunday church.  “You have surrendered dreams. What is life without dreams?  Too prosaic. Too sane.  Too much sanity is madness.”

He compared me to the man who drove ahead at lightning speed on the highway following the high beam of the headlight.  Rushing endlessly on the highway as if some treasure awaited you there at the end of the highway.  Death is what awaits you there.  The real magic lies on the sides of the highway.  In the darkness.  The whispers in the leaves.  The ripples in the rivulets.  The sigh of the bud as it opens itself to the kiss of the butterfly.

“Not your fault, however,” he consoled me.  “When insanity is the rule, butterflies find their shelter in museums.”

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJune 18, 2017 at 1:35 PM

    Very inspiring, the last two paragraphs. Your poem on it some months ago encouraged me to take up blogging. I still lack clarity on many things but do realize that profound beauty lie on the sides of the highway, waiting for the poor souls to gain wisdom.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJune 18, 2017 at 5:18 PM

      All the mad rush has not taken us very far. But people don't realise that.

      Delete
  2. parwatisingariJune 19, 2017 at 12:30 PM

    of course what is life without dreams...indeed.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
9 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Kailasnath the Paradox

AI-generated illustration It wasn’t easy to discern whether he was a friend or merely an amused onlooker. He was my colleague at the college, though from another department. When my life had entered a slippery slope because of certain unresolved psychological problems, he didn’t choose to shun me as most others did. However, when he did condescend to join me in the college canteen sipping tea and smoking a cigarette, I wasn’t ever sure whether he was befriending me or mocking me. Kailasnath was a bundle of paradoxes. He appeared to be an alpha male, so self-assured and lord of all that he surveyed. Yet if you cared to observe deeply, you would find too many chinks in his armour. Beneath all those domineering words and gestures lay ample signs of frailty. The tall, elegantly slim and precisely erect stature would draw anyone’s attention quickly. Kailasnath was always attractively dressed though never unduly stylish. Everything about him exuded an air of chic confidence. But the wa
9 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
16 comments
Read more