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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:
3. The
Castle
16. The Plague
I used to love Sanco Panza more than Quixote.
ReplyDeleteSancho was pragmatic.
DeleteOoh, is this where the word quixotic came from? Interesting. The influence the leaders have today to impose fabricated truths is frightening.
ReplyDeleteYes quixotic came from this fabulous character.
DeleteI'm particularly worried about the way Indians lap up fabticated truths.
Absolutely correct Sir. The genuine messiah is never playing to the gallery and remains concerned for the people only discarding all hype and propaganda.
ReplyDeleteWe have pseudo everything today!
DeleteI 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.
ReplyDeleteQuixote was a satirical character. The irony today is that satire has become the usual practice, life itself.
DeleteThere 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.
ReplyDeleteHistory will definitely overthrow them with huge laughter.
DeleteNot dozens..thousands of novels..Don`t we all suffer from Quixotic syndrome..see the world as it should be acc to us ?
ReplyDeleteYes. I too. But most people don't assault windmills.
DeleteI 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...
ReplyDeleteI love the way you review the books... Makes me all the more interested to pick up the book and read :)
True that there's a Quixote in many of us. That's what makes the novel a classic.
DeleteBeen seeing a lot of Quixote word. Glad to find the origin is here.!
ReplyDelete