Quixotic Duel With The Hulking Giants

A Kadir Jasin

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SINCE some debaters of the last posting complained that we are focusing too much on politics, so for this posting I will not write about politicos, politicus or politique.

I’ll instead talk about Don Quixote (Don Ki-ho-te). He is also known as the Man From La Mancha. Although his exploits dated back to the early 17th Century, he is still very much alive.

He was immortalized by Spanish author Maguel De Cervantes. Senor Cervantes on his part based Senor Quixote’s character on a manuscript by the creative Moorish historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli aka Sidi Hamid.

I was first introduced to Don Quixote back in 1966 or 1967 by my Malay Language teacher at the Saint Michael Secondary School in Alor Star, the late Cikgu Zainol Abidin Ismail.

We did not then read the novel but discussed its origin and contents because it has been called by some literary scholars as the most important novel ever written.

Understandably we mispronounced Quixote’s name. And many still do today.

I would later read the book and over the years watched several movie versions of the story. I’ve lost the book and when I recently went to Kinokuniya at KLCC to enquire about it, I was told it has gone out of print.

I am telling the story of Don Quixote because some of us may have, knowing or unknowingly, been behaving and acting like the fictional Spanish gentleman. In today’s medical science, Don Quixote’s behaviour would have been branded delusional.

Alonso (Don) Quixote, a country gentleman in his fifties was so affected by the books on chivalry he so much loved to read that he become obsessed with their contents.

Soon Senor Quixote found himself transformed into the heroes and the knights of his books. So, accompanies by his loyal servant, Sancho Panza, and riding a scrawny horse he went on a quest to save his fair maidens and all of mankind, which included his famous duel with the windmills he thought were hulking giants.

So don’t feel bad or ashamed if we sometimes feel like Don Quixote and have an uncontrollable urge to do battle with the windmills. It’s better to fight the windmills than to go crazy and run amok (amuck).

My worry is we may just do that because in Malaysia there’s no windmill. To find one, we have to go all the way to the Netherlands or some other parts of northern Europe.

So, in our quixotic quest to become the knights in shining armor to save the fair maidens and all of humanity, we may have to find our own versions of the hulking giants, which I have to leave entirely to your imagination.

All that I ask for is for you not to lose your sanity, even temporarily, and run amuck!

I shall not be your Sancho Panza and shout to you: “Those over there are not giants but windmills. Those things that seem to be their arms are sails which, when they are whirled around by the wind, turn the millstone."

I’ve tried my luck for so many years to be the lowly Sancho Panza and remind the quixotic characters around me not to be misled and misguided by the sweet words of their cronies, hangers-on and apple polishers.

Alas, like Don Quixote they continue to do battle with the windmills because unlike Sancho Panza who spoke the truth, their cronies, hangers-on and apple polishers told them what they love to hear and not what they ought to hear.