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

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let

Octlantis

I was reading an essay on octopuses when friend John walked in. When he is bored of his usual activities – babysitting and gardening – he would come over. Politics was the favourite concern of our conversations. We discussed politics so earnestly that any observer might think that we were running the world through the politicians quite like the gods running it through their devotees. “Octopuses are quite queer creatures,” I said. The essay I was reading had got all my attention. Moreover, I was getting bored of politics which is irredeemable anyway. “They have too many brains and a lot of hearts.” “That’s queer indeed,” John agreed. “Each arm has a mind of its own. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in their arms. The arms can taste, touch, feel and act on their own without any input from the brain.” “They are quite like our politicians,” John observed. Everything is linked to politics in John’s mind. I was impressed with his analogy, however. “Perhaps, you’re r