For two centuries, Nepali youth have traveled to alien lands to labor in factories, to guard palaces, to build cities in desert heat and arctic cold. They send home billions in remittances, the true backbone of our economy, while our leaders debate constitutional amendments that change nothing.
In the twilight of Spain’s fading empire, Miguel de Cervantes gifted the world a knight who saw giants where mere windmills stood. Don Quixote was not merely mad; he was tragically sincere, armed with rusted ideals and a heart full of impossible chivalry. He fought phantoms. He mistook squalid inns for castles. He believed his own delusions with such fervor that reality itself bent to accommodate his madness.
Today, as I walk through the streets of Kathmandu, as I listen to the young voices rising from Pokhara to Birgunj, I see not one Quixote but an entire political class mounted on broken steeds, charging at windmills while the real giants—poverty, corruption, unemployment, and institutional decay—trample the Nepali people underfoot.
The parallel is not merely poetic; it is painfully precise.
Consider the fundamental nature of Cervantes’ hero. Don Quixote was a man of reading, not of seeing. He had consumed so many romances that he could no longer distinguish between the world as it was and the world as he wished it to be.
Nepal’s political aristocracy, forged in the fires of the 1990 democratic movement and the subsequent Maoist insurgency, suffers from a similar bibliographic intoxication. They have read their own manifestos too often, recited their own revolutionary poetry too frequently, and attended too many international conferences where they are applauded as “stalwarts of South Asian democracy.”
Like Quixote poring over his books of chivalry until his brain dried up, our leaders have marinated in their own mythology until they have lost the capacity for clear sight. They speak of “federal democratic republic” as Quixote spoke of “damsels in distress”—with genuine passion, but with no connection to the lived experience of those they claim to serve.
Yet here is where the comparison sharpens into critique. Don Quixote, for all his madness, was brave. He was honest. He was loyal to his vision, however distorted. Can we say the same of those who currently occupy Singha Durbar? Quixote never enriched himself at the expense of his villagers.
He never accepted sacks of gold from the very giants he pretended to fight. He never appointed his horse to lucrative administrative positions. Our leaders, by contrast, have transformed quixotism from a psychological condition into a business model.
They tilt at windmills not because they cannot see reality, but because seeing reality would require them to act against their own interests. The windmill is safer than the giant. The windmill does not fight back. The windmill, most importantly, allows the performance of heroism without the substance of risk.
Nepal’s diplomatic history offers a devastating mirror to this theatrical politics. Consider the sagacity of the 19th century. When the British Empire, that colossus that had swallowed India whole, turned its gaze toward the Himalayas, our ancestors did not tilt at windmills.
They fought when fighting was wise—the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-16 demonstrated a ferocity that earned the Gurkhas eternal respect. But when the arithmetic of power became undeniable, they negotiated the Sugauli Treaty with the cold-eyed realism of survivors. They preserved the kingdom’s core.
They played the great game of imperial rivalry with subtlety that would have made Metternich proud. The Bhimsen Thapas and the Chandra Shamsheres were many things, but they were not deluded. They saw the world as it was, and they maneuvered within its constraints to protect a nation that had no business surviving between two hungry empires.
What would those ancestors make of their descendants? In 2024, Nepal’s foreign policy has become a kind of diplomatic quixotism—making grand gestures toward China while economically dependent on India, speaking of “non-alignment” while begging for aid from every quarter, signing memoranda of understanding that exist only in the imagination of press secretaries.
Our leaders ride out to battle “neo-colonialism” while their own children study in the universities of the Unite States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and their own bank accounts swell with remittances from the very neo-colonial economies they publicly denounce. At least Quixote believed his own lies. Our leaders do not even have the dignity of self-deception.
But to speak only of leaders is to miss half the story. The Nepali people themselves are the Sancho Panza of this tragicomedy—the practical, earthy, long-suffering companion who sees the windmill for what it is but follows his master nonetheless.
And here is where the analogy breaks, and breaks beautifully, because the Nepali people are no Sancho. They are something braver, something more enduring, something that history has tested and found unbreakable.
The fundamental attributes of the Nepali people are not the stuff of political rhetoric; they are carved into the mountainsides and written in the ledgers of foreign armies. Perseverance—the capacity to continue when continuation seems impossible.
For two centuries, Nepali youth have traveled to alien lands to labor in factories, to guard palaces, to build cities in desert heat and arctic cold. They send home billions in remittances, the true backbone of our economy, while our leaders debate constitutional amendments that change nothing.
Diligence—the willingness to work with hands and backs when opportunity is denied to minds. The Nepali worker does not ask for ease; he asks only for fairness, for a system that does not steal his labor before he has even performed it.
Accommodation—the spiritual generosity to share what little one has, to welcome the stranger, to find harmony in diversity that would tear other nations apart. These are not windmills. These are the granite foundations of a national character that has survived because it is fundamentally, stubbornly, magnificently real.
And yet, this very people, this Sancho-with-a-soul-of-steel, rises every decade or so to remind its Quixotes that the windmills are not giants. The 1990 democratic movement. The 2006 Loktantra Andolan. The 2015 constitution protests.
And now, in the post-Gen-Z uprising context, the youth are again in the streets—not with the romanticism of their grandparents, but with the cold fury of a generation that has been lied to with unprecedented efficiency. They do not want revolution.
They want Wi-Fi that works. They want job interviews that are not rigged. They want to stay in their own country without surrendering their dignity to migration brokers.
The youth unemployment crisis is the true giant in the room, and it is no phantom. Twenty percent of young Nepalis are unemployed. Forty percent of university graduates leave the country within five years. The civil service examination, that supposed meritocratic gateway, has become a lottery where the dice are loaded by political connection.
Our leaders respond to this crisis with quixotic absurdity—announcing “youth employment programs” that exist only in press releases, creating “innovation hubs” in buildings without electricity, speaking of “digital Nepal” while the national broadband project remains a decade behind schedule.
They are tilting at the windmill of “entrepreneurship,” hoping that if they praise startup culture loudly enough, they will not have to address the structural corruption that makes genuine business creation impossible.
The quality of governance has deteriorated to a point that would be comic if it were not tragic. Files move through ministries like glaciers through valleys—slow, grinding, and leaving destruction in their wake.
The federal system, designed to bring governance closer to the people, has instead created three layers of extraction, each more inventive than the last in finding new methods of rent-seeking.
Local governments, once imagined as laboratories of democracy, have become family enterprises where the chairman’s nephew handles procurement and the vice-chairman’s brother-in-law controls the budget. Quixote, at least, was harmless in his madness. Our leaders are actively destructive in theirs.
What makes the current moment different—what gives this repetition of history its particular sharpness—is the Gen-Z uprising. Previous protests were led by political parties with political agendas.
The current political wave of Nepal is leaderless in the traditional sense, organized through social media marinated contents, or falsehood caramelized with hubris rather than party committee, motivated by a disgust that transcends ideology.
These young people have grown up watching their parents’ remittances build houses that remain empty, watching their educated cousins drive taxis in Seoul, watching their national leaders speak of sovereignty while selling citizenship by investment to the highest bidder. They are not impressed by anti-imperialist rhetoric. They have seen the imperialism of incompetence, and it wears a Nepali face.
The tragedy of Don Quixote, Cervantes finally suggests, is not that he saw the world wrongly, but that the world had no place for his kind of seeing.
Nepal’s tragedy is the inverse: our leaders see the world correctly—they know where the money flows, they know how the system works, they know exactly which windmills to tilt at for maximum political profit—but they have chosen to act as if they were blind. They have the clarity of Quixote’s vision without his courage, the passion of his quest without his integrity.
There is hope, but it is not the hope of sudden transformation. History suggests that Nepal renews itself not through the wisdom of its rulers but through the resilience of its people. The same perseverance that built the Malla temples and carried Gurkha rifles across Flanders fields will, eventually, demand a government worthy of the name.
The question is not whether the windmills will fall—they are, after all, only windmills. The question is how much more of the nation’s strength must be spent on this absurd performance before someone finally says, with the plain honesty that has always been the Nepali gift: “Those are not giants, Your Excellency. They are windmills. And we are tired of watching you charge.”