Skip to main content

Quixote


Jules David, ‘Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’, 1887. Wikimedia Commons


Quixote – or Don Quixote, to be precise – is too classical to need an introduction or summary. Having read too many farfetched stories about chivalrous knights, a middle-aged and rather loony Alonso Quixano decides that he is a knight, Don Quixote de La Mancha. He gets himself a miserable steed and a squire, Sancho Panza, imagines a peasant woman as his beautiful lady Dulcinea, and embarks on a protracted adventure to save the world from all sorts of evils and monsters. He will finally be brought home by friends and neighbours as a broken and exhausted soul and will wake up from a deep slumber to the plain reality of his sombre mediocre existence – too tired to live it, however.

Quixote lives under a gargantuan delusion. He imagines himself as the saviour of the world. What he does, however, turns out to be either foolish or wicked. He can fight with windmills assuming that they are monsters or demand a landlord to free the slave-boy whom he is torturing. The windmills knock him off his horse and the landlord tortures the boy more after Quixote leaves them. No good happens anywhere because of Quixote’s chivalry.

Quixote is like a man with a bloated ego standing alone on top of a hill. Everybody down the hill looks small to him and he looks small to everybody. He is not even smart enough to understand that the littleness is an optical illusion, the littleness of others at least. The world down the hill goes on irrespective of what he thinks about it, but he is convinced that it is going on according to his orders. He believes that he is moving everything in that world.

We have a lot of such leaders today; we had them in the past too. Most of the leaders are not as foolish Quixote. Our leaders know how to impose the truths fabricated by them on the people even as Quixote imposes himself. They can make people believe things that were written thousands of years ago and were eventually proved utterly wrong by science. They can make people die for those truths. They make people kill for those truths. When people follow such rulers, we wonder whether they are the real Quixotes – deluded silhouettes.

When the whole life around you seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? This is one of the many questions that Don Quixote raises. Sanity can be madness – “and maddest of all,” as the novel says. Quixote saw life as it should be. As it should be, according to him. Not as life really is. Reality is subsumed under quixotic fancies and fantasies. Quixote’s world is full of nice slogans, empty rhetoric, and endless promises.

Nobody took Cervantes’s Quixote seriously. But today’s Quixotes are perceived as national(ist) heroes and religious messiahs.

Fake messiahs.

A genuine messiah is not bothered by what people think of him. He doesn’t pause dramatically for applause from the gallery. He won’t ever advertise himself and his projects on the mass media and other places. The genuine messiah is motivated by only one thing: the welfare of the people. He envisions what is good for the people and he forges strategies for materialising his vision. People understand his greatness from what he does. Admiration will follow naturally without any need for advertisements and propaganda.

Today we have too many well-advertised, hyped-up messiahs who are the contemporary versions of Don Quixote. Cervantes would have stuff for a dozen novels were he living today.


PS. This is part of a series being written for the #BlogchatterA2Z Challenge. The previous parts are:
14. No Exit

Comments

  1. I used to love Sanco Panza more than Quixote.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ooh, is this where the word quixotic came from? Interesting. The influence the leaders have today to impose fabricated truths is frightening.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes quixotic came from this fabulous character.

      I'm particularly worried about the way Indians lap up fabticated truths.

      Delete
  3. Absolutely correct Sir. The genuine messiah is never playing to the gallery and remains concerned for the people only discarding all hype and propaganda.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think almost everyone is 'a Quixote' today or so they like to believe. Fabrication is a part of life.makes living in denial so easy. Your contemporary parallel to the classic makes it interesting. As they say art transcends time and space.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Quixote was a satirical character. The irony today is that satire has become the usual practice, life itself.

      Delete
  5. There were Quixotes in history, there are many today and there would be many in future too. What remains to be seen that whether the society accepts or overthrows them once they realise the truth about these Quixotes.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. History will definitely overthrow them with huge laughter.

      Delete
  6. Not dozens..thousands of novels..Don`t we all suffer from Quixotic syndrome..see the world as it should be acc to us ?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes. I too. But most people don't assault windmills.

      Delete
  7. I guess it's not only limited to the world leaders... Anyone who is in that post called leader big or small... Bears similarity to this character and thinks he is on top of that hill... It's Quixoticism instead of leadership...

    I love the way you review the books... Makes me all the more interested to pick up the book and read :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. True that there's a Quixote in many of us. That's what makes the novel a classic.

      Delete
  8. Been seeing a lot of Quixote word. Glad to find the origin is here.!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Remedios the Beauty and Innocence

  Remedios the Beauty is a character in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude . Like most members of her family, she too belongs to solitude. But unlike others, she is very innocent too. Physically she is the most beautiful woman ever seen in Macondo, the place where the story of her family unfolds. Is that beauty a reflection of her innocence? Well, Marquez doesn’t suggest that explicitly. But there is an implication to that effect. Innocence does make people look charming. What else is the charm of children? Remedios’s beauty is dangerous, however. She is warned by her great grandmother, who is losing her eyesight, not to appear before men. The girl’s beauty coupled with her innocence will have disastrous effects on men. But Remedios is unaware of “her irreparable fate as a disturbing woman.” She is too innocent to know such things though she is an adult physically. Every time she appears before outsiders she causes a panic of exasperation. To make...

The Death of Truth and a lot more

Susmesh Chandroth in his kitchen “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” Poet Shelley told us long ago. I was reading an interview with a prominent Malayalam writer, Susmesh Chandroth, this morning when Shelley returned to my memory. Chandroth says he left Kerala because the state had too much of affluence which is not conducive for the production of good art and literature. He chose to live in Kolkata where there is the agony of existence and hence also its ecstasies. He’s right about Kerala’s affluence. The state has eradicated poverty except in some small tribal pockets. Today almost every family in Kerala has at least one person working abroad and sending dollars home making the state’s economy far better than that of most of its counterparts. You will find palatial houses in Kerala with hardly anyone living in them. People who live in some distant foreign land get mansions constructed back home though they may never intend to come and live here. There are ...

The Covenant of Water

Book Review Title: The Covenant of Water Author: Abraham Verghese Publisher: Grove Press UK, 2023 Pages: 724 “What defines a family isn’t blood but the secrets they share.” This massive book explores the intricacies of human relationships with a plot that spans almost a century. The story begins in 1900 with 12-year-old Mariamma being wedded to a 40-year-old widower in whose family runs a curse: death by drowning. The story ends in 1977 with another Mariamma, the granddaughter of Mariamma the First who becomes Big Ammachi [grandmother]. A lot of things happen in the 700+ pages of the novel which has everything that one may expect from a popular novel: suspense, mystery, love, passion, power, vulnerability, and also some social and religious issues. The only setback, if it can be called that at all, is that too many people die in this novel. But then, when death by drowning is a curse in the family, we have to be prepared for many a burial. The Kerala of the pre-Independ...

Koorumala Viewpoint

  Koorumala is at once reticent and coquettish. It is an emerging tourist spot in the Ernakulam district of Kerala. At an altitude of 169 metres from MSL, the viewpoint is about 40 km from Kochi. The final stretch of the road, about 2 km, is very narrow. It passes through lush green forest-looking topography. The drive itself is exhilarating. And finally you arrive at a 'Pay & Park' signboard on a rocky terrain. The land belongs to the CSI St Peter's Church. You park your vehicle there and walk up a concrete path which leads to a tiled walkway which in turn will take you the viewpoint. Below are some pictures of the place.  From the parking lot to the viewpoint The tiled walkway A selfie from near the view tower  A view from the tower Another view The tower and the rest mandap at the back Koorumala viewpoint is a recent addition to Kerala's tourist map. It's a 'cool' place for people of nearby areas to spend some leisure in splendid isolation from the hu...