Glorious Terrible War

As Arjuna looked through the corner of his eyes, he spotted Karna’s chariot ravaging through the battlefield. This was his chance to glory, all his life he had trained for this moment. Today, he will fight Karna, his arch-rival, the ultimate warrior, and a noble enemy. Stories will be written, and songs will be sung about his victory over Karna. And even if it does not go in his favor, the doors of heaven will be open! All the deities will welcome him as he died a noble death on the battlefield. As he approached Karna, a shower of arrows greeted him. He also started shooting arrows with exceptional speed and precision. All the great warriors and common foot-soldiers alike stopped fighting to watch this ultimate dual. Even the gods showed up to see this belle of death and glory. With tremendous skill, Karna would strike down all his arrows, as does he. But he is just a bit better than Karna. Amid this deadly dance, he saw an opportunity. He loaded his finest arrow, pulled the string of his might bow Gandiva to his ears–in this moment of excellence, he even forgot about the glory and the songs through the ages–and let the arrow go. It traveled like a beam of light, like a fish in the water, quick and nimble, it pierced through Karna’s shiny armor. Karna looked him in the eyes for the last time, not with enmity, but with friendly respect as he had beat him fair on the battlefield. He also gave a friendly nod, as Karna took his last breath. The soldiers cheered in a roar, and all the mighty warriors applauded, even the gods admired his skills. Ages will remember him for this moment!

And he woke up from his daydream. Karna’s chariot is in front of him, stuck in the mud. Karna is on the ground, desperately trying to get the wheel out of the mud. His clothes and his armor covered in filth. Sri Krishna, Arjuna’s Sarathi, tells him, “Shoot Arjuna! This is your chance.” “But he is unarmed,” his voice cracked. “This is not the time for pondering, Arjuna. Think about the thousands of Pandava soldiers he will kill. What if he kills one of your brothers? “. He took out an arrow, reluctantly and with shame. The arrow stuck Karna and open a large wound on his torso. Red blood started to flow, mixing with the dirt. Karna tried to stop the bleeding with his hands but in vain. The mighty Karna lay dead on the ground, covered in dirt, his eyes wide open with anger. But for Arjuna, it was he who was covered in filth. Filth and shame. He did not feel like a great warrior but a murderer. 

He felt like running away, leaving the war behind, never to touch a bow again. But as he saw around, soldiers hacking each other, beating the downed men to death, charioted warriors killing foot-soldiers by the dozens, blood and screams of the wounded. The rush of battle ran through his veins. He was no worse than the ones fighting around; he alone was not a murderer. And if it is in his destiny, like his son Abhimanyu, he will also see his day of glory. He raised his bow and engaged again in the Glorious Terrible War.

Note: Recently, I stumbled upon Jeff Wright’s excellent podcast on the Trojan War. One of the episodes in the podcast is titled Glorious Terrible War, where he talks about how Homer in The Iliad sings about the glory of war but does not shy away from showing it’s terror. I realized the Mahabharat also does the same and it served as the inspiration for this post. The killing of Karna exposes the terrible nature of war, but in the hearts and minds of the warriors, the hope of glory still endures.

Wars of our Time – War in Afghanistan (Not the one you think)

In December 1979, the Soviet Union launched an invasion on Afghanistan or, more precisely, on the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan. The Soviet intervention was mostly to support the communist lead government of Afghanistan. The Soviet operation was not the start of a war, per se. But in response to the civil war that was ravaging the country for the last 18 months — ever since the communist government took control of the country — a war that the Afghan government was not winning. However, this intervention will bring international “attention” to this poor land-locked country and will have some long-lasting effects on world diplomacy.

Big Brother is Watching (and supplying arms)

With the Soviets in Afghanistan, it was not long before the United States got interested. They just wanted to do whatever they can do to make life miserable for the Soviets. Pakistan supported the Mujahideen rebel groups ever since their inception, and now the United States was supporting Pakistan. This was a beautiful arrangement for the United States because, with all the arms they provided, the Mujahideen groups were giving real tough time to the Soviets. Although the Soviets were largely successful with their campaigns, in a war like this, the longer the war drags, the more they would get defeated, and defeated they were. In 1985 they gave up and pulled the army back from Afghanistan. This war — apparently a Jihad against atheist and progressive Soviets-also attracted a bunch of fighters/financiers/warlords from all over the world, one such individual was Osama Bin Laden.

Check out this awesome video by Feature History for more details

The Mess

The Soviets left, but the war did not. The Soviets were merely aiding the Afghan government if you remember, and now the government had to fight without their direct support. They backed the government with material for a while. However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the aid dried up, and soon the Mujahideen groups took control of most of Afghanistan by 1992. This might seem like the end of the war, for better or for worse. However, as they were deciding on how to share the power among themselves, there were disagreements. Most groups under the leadership of Rabbani and Massoud agreed to share power, but Hekmatyar and his Pakistan backed militia wanted Kabul for themselves, and a new war commence. By 1996 a new group of militia called Taliban, also backed by Pakistan, emerged as the strongest force. Soon they conquered Kabul. Massoud and his supporters, often called the Northern Alliance, were facing tough odds.

What About the War?

On September 9, 2001, Massoud was assassinated by Taliban fighters disguised as journalists. With their leader gone, defeat was imminent for Northern Alliance. Two days later — 7000 miles away, in a world completely different from the barren hills of Afghanistan — something happened. As tragic and terrible as war. Soon a new military will join the fight, with drones and Kevlar vests and aircraft careers.

As for war, war will continue.

Sources:

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Afghan_War
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghan_Civil_War_(1992%E2%80%931996)

My take on ‘Pity the Nation’

Note: Last night when I read the stories that vandals protesting the film ‘Padmavaat’ hurled stones at a school bus with children and that multiplex association is succumbing to the demands of such goons, I had a mix of emotion, the strongest of them being anger. All I could think was the first line of the classic poem, ‘Pity the nation’, by Khalil Gibran. I took that first line and tried to put some words of my own with both tribute and apology to the great poet#.

 

Pity the Nation
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as a hero*
Pity the nation whose valor is in hurling stones at children
Pity the nation where opinions are enforced by muscle

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox*,
leader a wolf, people sheep and journalist a puppet
Pity the nation where pen is tied but sword is rampant

Pity the nation where sage is silenced and conman listened
Pity the nation where bigotry is called culture and xenophobia a virtue,
And streets are burned for selfish gains

Pity the nation where children sleep unfed,
Where rich are always the righteous and trickster is called genius
Pity the nation which tries to find happiness in numbers on a billboard

Pity the nation whose most valued asset is phantom pride
Pity the nation who raises not its voice except to oppress the weak,
And kneels not except the enemy is strong

Pity the nation which is indulged in past,
Whose facts come from story books,
Where minds are rarely ignited,
What prevails is apathy and what’s missing is a spine

Pity the nation which has lost its freedom before finding it ever

– Ks

# Apparently, I am not the first one to do so. Human beings much greater than me has also taken such liberty, most notably Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which is a relief.

* From original poem by Khalil Gibran

Extra Comments
As one can see this work is cynical in nature also very clear to anyone with a right palate would be the utter lack of beauty and subtlety. The fact is that I don’t know poetry and creating something beautiful was not my purpose. As for subtlety, this work is not born from ecstasy or love, or agony or anything that you might want to be subtle about. This is work of anger I let it be like that. Moreover, I don’t deem it necessary in the time of moral crisis. Even though it’s born out of recent events in India, and the state of modern day India in mind, what it says does not apply only to India, but any nation who exabits such qualities or a subset of such qualities. Lastly, even though devoid of beauty, lacking subtlety and born out of anger, I hope the reader will connect with the feeling that drives it and will see it as more than a rant.

Installing Zeppelin notebook on Windows 10

Currently, Apache Zeppelin is the preferred notebook for Spark. It also offers a wide variety of other interpreters,  markdown, and good visualization, which makes it a great tool for your Spark or general Big Data project. However, from y personal experience I have found that installing Zeppelin on Windows machine can be a bit complicated and somewhat frustrating. The official document says that you only need Java installed and Java Home for Zeppelin to work, even on Windows.  However, it looks like a white lie to me. Mostly I have noticed that with those steps only you will see the following error message with Saprk interpreter.

java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.apache.zeppelin.spark.Utils.invokeMethod(Utils.java:38)

Null Pointer Exception

NullPointerException, thou mighty bitch

Here is a guide of steps that worked for me and my friend on Windows 10. I am not claiming that it will definitely work for you or that skipping any of the steps will definitely not work. But, it was exactly those steps that worked for both of us, nothing less.

1. Install Java and set Java Home environment variable. This is a pretty standard procedure and people have been doing it since forever. (A recent hieroglyph found in Egypt describes how people used to do that in ancient Egypt).

2. Download Zeppelin notebook from here and extract (using 7-zip or other) it to your local machine. Avoid ‘C:\Program Files’ as the directory, if you don’t want to mess with admin privileges. I simply chose plain C:, but ‘C:\users\<username>’ is also fine.

3. Download Hadoop 2.7.x from here. Download binary, not source. Extract it to your machine, Again avoid ‘Program Files’.

4. Download ‘winutils.exe’ from here. Paste it in ‘<your-hadoop-directory>\bin’.

5. Set environment variable ‘HADOOP_HOME’ and point it to your Hadoop directory. Your final settings in environment variable should look like this.

Environment variables settings

Your Environment variables should look like this

6. Go to Zeppelin-directory\bin and start Zeppelin by launching ‘zeppelin.cmd’

7.

a. Once inside zeppelin click on the menu on top right corner and select ‘interpreter’ as shown in the image.

Select Interpreter

Select Interpreter

b. Scroll down to Spark section and click on edit (pencil icon). Set the last variable ‘zeppelin.spark.useHiveContext’ to ‘false’

Select edit

Set useHiveContext to false

Set useHiveContext to false

C. Click on save button.

8. Now create a new notebook (or use the spark tutorial notebook). Save interpreter setting, keep Spark as default. Run the code ‘sc.version’. Viola, if you have not sinned too much in past you will see the following output.

It should show your Spark Version

It should show your Spark Version

Group assignments

Group assignments and projects are highly regarded in academia, they are supposed to develop team work in students and that kind of untrue shit. But let’s see how an actual academic team project goes on. Like animal groups, project group also has an Alpha and a Beta. However, it also has a bunch of gammas depending on the team size. Unlike, animals where Alpha dominates and Betas follow. This human group has a more complicated chain of command. If you ever worked in a group project you have probably experienced following scenarios.

First, let’s see who is who

Alpha – The guy who does 80% of the work

Beta – The guy who at least tries.

Gammas – All other who basically don’t give shit

  1. Alpha quickly takes control, but says in a Google CEO fashion that ‘I don’t want to decide topic, let’s all propose an idea and we will have a discussion to choose the best one.’
  2. Beta knows that his idea is not going to be accepted, but still does a halfhearted effort come up with some idea. And the Gammas, well they (paste the last four words from their description here)
  3. A group meeting is called and canceled multiple times before finally a fruitless meeting is conducted.
  4. And guess who’s idea is finalized? Yup, you are right.
  5. Everyone is assigned responsibilities, which all know don’t mean shit.
  6. As his proposal is finalized Alpha is both excited and obliged to work, and starts working in total isolation from the team. Beta, now somewhat relieved moves to even more passive role. And the Gammas say that they are reviewing literature, my ass.
  7. Alpha gives Beta some work and after working for a week, when he reports to Alpha that he is done, this is what Alpha says, “Actually, I changed the system flow, now we don’t need that shit anymore. Did I forget to tell you? Anyway, you learned something. Yes, you did forget to tell me and this ‘something’ was literally the last entry in my ‘things to learn’ list.
  8. Alpha gives Beta another work and when it’s done, reveals that he has (secretly) completed the work on his own already.
  9. Gammas start skipping meetings giving strange and/or unbelievable reasons. I am locked in the apartment, my hand hurts, my roommate is coming back from his day job and I must be there to cordially receive him.
  10. More fruitless meetings, where Gammas say weird and irrelevant things which are overlooked and not corrected mostly because of laziness (and to avoid awkward conversations). These meetings are moot anyway as Alpha is doing almost everything, but are still held with good ‘esprit de corps’.
  11. The deadline for first deliverables come close and Alpha first time in his life tries to give some minor work to a Gamma only to realize that Gamma doesn’t even have a remote idea about what’s going on.
  12. Programming starts where one of the Gamma says, “Dude, you have forgotten a semicolon there. Not there, little up, up, you went too up, down.” “Thanks, asshole, you think you are a great service. But you know what, the compiler would have given the line number.”
  13. One of the Gamma uploads some random shit to GitHub repository as his ‘contribution’, which stays there until the very last moment until someone (Alpha or Beta) notices it.
  14. Failed attempts to make Gammas do easy task like writing less important sections of the report are made.
  15. Alpha assigns even easier tasks to Gamma. “Okay, the code is ready can run it on cloud and check the results.”. The Gamma replies, “Let’s have a meeting”. I don’t want to have a meeting, mofo. Just run the f**king code.
  16. Alpha realizes that he has done almost everything and Gamma has done almost nothing. He starts assigning ridicules tasks to Gammas, only to feel better. “Okay, I have completed the 10 page final report in LaTeX , can you convert it to PDF?” This time Gamma does ‘the job’ successfully.
  17. On the day of presentation Beta and Gammas are carefully given minor topics, so they don’t get caught. Almost every question is answered by Alpha.
  18. While preparing the final report Mr. Asshole, whose only contribution is a failed effort to format LaTeX, says that ‘Let’s keep names in alphabetical order’ — Mr. Douchebag agrees.

 

Note: He is to read as he or she. I generally randomize the use, but for this post it proved difficult.

Something about airplanes

Airplanes! One of the coolest stuff in the world. It’s a common trend that when we are young we aspire to be a pilot and as we grow up we forget how cool a passenger jet is and take it as a mundane object. I don’t remember whether becoming a pilot was there for a considerable time in my agenda as a child, but I very clearly remember that as an 11-year old I was totally captivated by the Boeing 747-200* that took me from Chhatrapati Shivaji airport in Mumbai to Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris. And even now, after tens of journeys in these magnificent machines, I am still excited about the prospect of boarding an aircraft, takeoff, traveling almost at speed of sound (80%) and finally landing. And I hope I will continue to do so for rest of my life. However, now as an engineer and a ‘scientist in progress’ it would have been better if I could have learned a little bit about the technical aspects of flight while flying. And guess who comes in to picture, ‘Panasonic Avionics’ fitted in the brand new Boeing 777-300ER of Kuwait Airways (it’s not that easy to guess, I know). Avionics are the electronics related to aviation, thus Aviation + Electronics =  Avionics. Now, this Boeing 777 in which I traveled had the facility to see flight related data in the in-flight entertainment screen. I could see on my screen the speed of the aircraft, altitude (height), vertical speed, pitch and roll, direction and some other data updated almost live. Apart from that the live feed from the bottom and the front camera of the aircraft. On my entire trip, I had the pleasure of witnessing 5 takeoffs and 5 landings and I was glued to that screen during each one of them. This actually was a wonderful experience and learned something about the flight.

Boeing 777

Boeing 777 has the most powerful jet engines in the world.

About JFK-ADI-JFK and Boeing 777

As I said during my recent trip back to India, I traveled in Boeing 777-300ER (300 suggests longer hull and ER stands for extended range). This gorgeous aircraft was introduced in 1994 and will soon outsell the famous Boeing 747 ‘Jumbo jet’. It’s not quite as big as 747, but still quite large. It can accommodate about 350 passengers in three class seating and more than 400 in a two-class arrangement. However, the most exciting thing about 777 is that it’s powered by two GE90 turbofan jet engines, each of them produces more power than Titanic and is the most powerful jet engine in the world. And yes, it’s twin jet means powered by only two jet engines rather than four, which is quite exceptional for its size.

Airbus A380

The mighty beast that didn’t last

About A380

I have traveled in many of the popular passenger jets. In the small segment (technically narrow-body), a couple of times in Boeing 737 and a myriad of times Airbus A320 variants (Indigo’s entire fleet is of A320s). In the larger ones (wide-body), Boeing 747, Boeing 777 and probably Airbus A340. I am still to experience the next generation of aircrafts, Airbus A350 XWB and Boeing 787. But the one I am most excited about is none other than Airbus A380 ‘Superjumbo’, the largest passenger jet in the world. I plan to seize the earliest opportunity I get to get on board the ‘Superjumbo’. I had been reading about its development as a teen and was pretty excited about how it would revolutionize commercial aviation. Today, a decade later, it makes me sad to know that A380 is commercially a failure. With Airbus reducing the production to just one per month starting from 2018, the fate of this gigantic beast seems to be grounded forever.

 

*Might be 747-400. I remember it as 747-200, and however confident (and proud) I am about my memory, statistically 400 seems more likely.

Something About Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Some time ago when I watched ‘Imitation Game’ the film based on the life of computer legend Alan Turing I was emotionally overwhelmed. But first, let’s begin with the basics. Who was Alan Turing? What did he do? Turing was a mathematician and a cryptanalyst. And he did as the movie says something that ‘No one ever imagined’. Turing was the lead the team at Bletchley park to crack Enigma, the cipher* used by Axis forces and which was considered impossible to crack. He did so by the means of a machine with several rotating barrels. When everyone was trying to decrypt it manually, he realized that only a machine will be able to beat a machine and he created ‘Bombe’, the machine that changed the course of Second World War. It is no exaggeration to say that cracking enigma shortened the war by at least two years and saved lives of millions. Turing was one of the very first human beings who were able to see the importance of an intelligent machine. Turing was surely ahead of time, he created the Turing Machine, which is the predecessor of the modern computer. At the time when computer science was still incipient, he imagined machines as intelligent as humans. For that, he proposed a test now called the Turing test from which the movie ‘Imitation game’ derives its name. In the Turing test a person sitting in a room converse by the means of typing, to either another person or a machine sitting in another room. He does not know whether he is conversing with a person or a machine and he has to determine it at the end of the test. If he is able to identify the machine, the test fails and so does the AI system. On the other hand, if the judge is unable to distinguish the machine from the human, the test is a success. This remains the ultimate test for AI systems even today, where a computer has to imitate the human. However, sadly he was never celebrated for what he did during his lifetime, which unfortunately was short because of the cruelty and stupidity of the society. His work at Bletchley Park which saved millions of life was a top secret and was classified. For all his services he was met with total ungratefulness from the part of society. He was charged with indecency as he was a homosexual and being one was a crime at that time. After the prosecution, he was offered imprisonment or chemical castration to ‘cure’ him. He chose not to go to the prison, two years later he was found dead in his apartment, most probably by poisoning himself. This is what the world gave him in return. It is an irony that, slaying millions of life on the name of war is not ‘indecency’ but a very personal, totally harmless predilection is ‘indecency’. In the year 2014, the queen issued a royal pardon to Alan Turing, conceding that what the law did with him was wrong. Today, the most prestigious prize in computer science is called Turing prize, also considered as Noble prize of computing world. But none of this gives justice to Alan Turing and the cruel game society played with him.

Ionitch by Anton Chekhov

I
WHEN visitors to the provincial town S—- complained of the dreariness and monotony of life, the inhabitants of the town, as though defending themselves, declared that it was very nice in S—-, that there was a library, a theatre, a club; that they had balls; and, finally, that there were clever, agreeable, and interesting families with whom one could make acquaintance. And they used to point to the family of the Turkins as the most highly cultivated and talented.
This family lived in their own house in the principal street, near the Governor’s. Ivan Petrovitch Turkin himself — a stout, handsome, dark man with whiskers — used to get up amateur performances for benevolent objects, and used to take the part of an elderly general and cough very amusingly. He knew a number of anecdotes, charades, proverbs, and was fond of being humorous and witty, and he always wore an expression from which it was impossible to tell whether he were joking or in earnest. His wife, Vera Iosifovna — a thin, nice-looking lady who wore a pince-nez — used to write novels and stories, and was very fond of reading them aloud to her visitors. The daughter, Ekaterina Ivanovna, a young girl, used to play on the piano. In short, every member of the family had a special talent. The Turkins welcomed visitors, and good-humouredly displayed their talents with genuine simplicity. Their stone house was roomy and cool in summer; half of the windows looked into a shady old garden, where nightingales used to sing in the spring. When there were visitors in the house, there was a clatter of knives in the kitchen and a smell of fried onions in the yard — and that was always a sure sign of a plentiful and savoury supper to follow.
And as soon as Dmitri Ionitch Startsev was appointed the district doctor, and took up his abode at Dyalizh, six miles from S—-, he, too, was told that as a cultivated man it was essential for him to make the acquaintance of the Turkins. In the winter he was introduced to Ivan Petrovitch in the street; they talked about the weather, about the theatre, about the cholera; an invitation followed. On a holiday in the spring — it was Ascension Day — after seeing his patients, Startsev set off for town in search of a little recreation and to make some purchases. He walked in a leisurely way (he had not yet set up his carriage), humming all the time:
” ‘Before I’d drunk the tears from life’s goblet. . . .’ ”
In town he dined, went for a walk in the gardens, then Ivan Petrovitch’s invitation came into his mind, as it were of itself, and he decided to call on the Turkins and see what sort of people they were.
“How do you do, if you please?” said Ivan Petrovitch, meeting him on the steps. “Delighted, delighted to see such an agreeable visitor. Come along; I will introduce you to my better half. I tell him, Verotchka,” he went on, as he presented the doctor to his wife –“I tell him that he has no human right to sit at home in a hospital; he ought to devote his leisure to society. Oughtn’t he, darling?”
“Sit here,” said Vera Iosifovna, making her visitor sit down beside her. “You can dance attendance on me. My husband is jealous — he is an Othello; but we will try and behave so well that he will notice nothing.”
“Ah, you spoilt chicken!” Ivan Petrovitch muttered tenderly, and he kissed her on the forehead. “You have come just in the nick of time,” he said, addressing the doctor again. “My better half has written a ‘hugeous’ novel, and she is going to read it aloud to-day.”
“Petit Jean,” said Vera Iosifovna to her husband, “dites que l’on nous donne du thé.”
Startsev was introduced to Ekaterina Ivanovna, a girl of eighteen, very much like her mother, thin and pretty. Her expression was still childish and her figure was soft and slim; and her developed girlish bosom, healthy and beautiful, was suggestive of spring, real spring.
Then they drank tea with jam, honey, and sweetmeats, and with very nice cakes, which melted in the mouth. As the evening came on, other visitors gradually arrived, and Ivan Petrovitch fixed his laughing eyes on each of them and said:
“How do you do, if you please?”
Then they all sat down in the drawing-room with very serious faces, and Vera Iosifovna read her novel. It began like this: “The frost was intense. . . .” The windows were wide open; from the kitchen came the clatter of knives and the smell of fried onions. . . . It was comfortable in the soft deep arm-chair; the lights had such a friendly twinkle in the twilight of the drawing-room, and at the moment on a summer evening when sounds of voices and laughter floated in from the street and whiffs of lilac from the yard, it was difficult to grasp that the frost was intense, and that the setting sun was lighting with its chilly rays a solitary wayfarer on the snowy plain. Vera Iosifovna read how a beautiful young countess founded a school, a hospital, a library, in her village, and fell in love with a wandering artist; she read of what never happens in real life, and yet it was pleasant to listen — it was comfortable, and such agreeable, serene thoughts kept coming into the mind, one had no desire to get up.
“Not badsome . . .” Ivan Petrovitch said softly.
And one of the visitors hearing, with his thoughts far away, said hardly audibly:
“Yes . . . truly. . . .”
One hour passed, another. In the town gardens close by a band was playing and a chorus was singing. When Vera Iosifovna shut her manuscript book, the company was silent for five minutes, listening to “Lutchina” being sung by the chorus, and the song gave what was not in the novel and is in real life.
“Do you publish your stories in magazines?” Startsev asked Vera Iosifovna.
“No,” she answered. “I never publish. I write it and put it away in my cupboard. Why publish?” she explained. “We have enough to live on.”
And for some reason every one sighed.
“And now, Kitten, you play something,” Ivan Petrovitch said to his daughter.
The lid of the piano was raised and the music lying ready was opened. Ekaterina Ivanovna sat down and banged on the piano with both hands, and then banged again with all her might, and then again and again; her shoulders and bosom shook. She obstinately banged on the same notes, and it sounded as if she would not leave off until she had hammered the keys into the piano. The drawing-room was filled with the din; everything was resounding; the floor, the ceiling, the furniture. . . . Ekaterina Ivanovna was playing a difficult passage, interesting simply on account of its difficulty, long and monotonous, and Startsev, listening, pictured stones dropping down a steep hill and going on dropping, and he wished they would leave off dropping; and at the same time Ekaterina Ivanovna, rosy from the violent exercise, strong and vigorous, with a lock of hair falling over her forehead, attracted him very much. After the winter spent at Dyalizh among patients and peasants, to sit in a drawing-room, to watch this young, elegant, and, in all probability, pure creature, and to listen to these noisy, tedious but still cultured sounds, was so pleasant, so novel. . . .
“Well, Kitten, you have played as never before,” said Ivan Petrovitch, with tears in his eyes, when his daughter had finished and stood up. “Die, Denis; you won’t write anything better.”
All flocked round her, congratulated her, expressed astonishment, declared that it was long since they had heard such music, and she listened in silence with a faint smile, and her whole figure was expressive of triumph.
“Splendid, superb!”
“Splendid,” said Startsev, too, carried away by the general enthusiasm. “Where have you studied?” he asked Ekaterina Ivanovna. “At the Conservatoire?”
“No, I am only preparing for the Conservatoire, and till now have been working with Madame Zavlovsky.”
“Have you finished at the high school here?”
“Oh, no,” Vera Iosifovna answered for her, “We have teachers for her at home; there might be bad influences at the high school or a boarding school, you know. While a young girl is growing up, she ought to be under no influence but her mother’s.”
“All the same, I’m going to the Conservatoire,” said Ekaterina Ivanovna.
“No. Kitten loves her mamma. Kitten won’t grieve papa and mamma.”
“No, I’m going, I’m going,” said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with playful caprice and stamping her foot.
And at supper it was Ivan Petrovitch who displayed his talents. Laughing only with his eyes, he told anecdotes, made epigrams, asked ridiculous riddles and answered them himself, talking the whole time in his extraordinary language, evolved in the course of prolonged practice in witticism and evidently now become a habit: “Badsome,” “Hugeous,” “Thank you most dumbly,” and so on.
But that was not all. When the guests, replete and satisfied, trooped into the hall, looking for their coats and sticks, there bustled about them the footman Pavlusha, or, as he was called in the family, Pava — a lad of fourteen with shaven head and chubby cheeks.
Come, Pava, perform!” Ivan Petrovitch said to him.
Pava struck an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic tone: “Unhappy woman, die!”
And every one roared with laughter.
“It’s entertaining,” thought Startsev, as he went out into the street.
He went to a restaurant and drank some beer, then set off to walk home to Dyalizh; he walked all the way singing:
” ‘Thy voice to me so languid and caressing. . . .’ ”
On going to bed, he felt not the slightest fatigue after the six miles’ walk. On the contrary, he felt as though he could with pleasure have walked another twenty.
“Not badsome,” he thought, and laughed as he fell asleep.

II
Startsev kept meaning to go to the Turkins’ again, but there was a great deal of work in the hospital, and he was unable to find free time. In this way more than a year passed in work and solitude. But one day a letter in a light blue envelope was brought him from the town.
Vera Iosifovna had been suffering for some time from migraine, but now since Kitten frightened her every day by saying that she was going away to the Conservatoire, the attacks began to be more frequent. All the doctors of the town had been at the Turkins’; at last it was the district doctor’s turn. Vera Iosifovna wrote him a touching letter in which she begged him to come and relieve her sufferings. Startsev went, and after that he began to be often, very often at the Turkins’. . . . He really did something for Vera Iosifovna, and she was already telling all her visitors that he was a wonderful and exceptional doctor. But it was not for the sake of her migraine that he visited the Turkins’ now. . . .
It was a holiday. Ekaterina Ivanovna finished her long, wearisome exercises on the piano. Then they sat a long time in the dining-room, drinking tea, and Ivan Petrovitch told some amusing story. Then there was a ring and he had to go into the hall to welcome a guest; Startsev took advantage of the momentary commotion, and whispered to Ekaterina Ivanovna in great agitation:
“For God’s sake, I entreat you, don’t torment me; let us go into the garden!”
She shrugged her shoulders, as though perplexed and not knowing what he wanted of her, but she got up and went.
“You play the piano for three or four hours,” he said, following her; “then you sit with your mother, and there is no possibility of speaking to you. Give me a quarter of an hour at least, I beseech you.”
Autumn was approaching, and it was quiet and melancholy in the old garden; the dark leaves lay thick in the walks. It was already beginning to get dark early.
“I haven’t seen you for a whole week,” Startsev went on, “and if you only knew what suffering it is! Let us sit down. Listen to me.”
They had a favourite place in the garden; a seat under an old spreading maple. And now they sat down on this seat.
“What do you want?” said Ekaterina Ivanovna drily, in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I have not seen you for a whole week; I have not heard you for so long. I long passionately, I thirst for your voice. Speak.”
She fascinated him by her freshness, the naïve expression of her eyes and cheeks. Even in the way her dress hung on her, he saw something extraordinarily charming, touching in its simplicity and naïve grace; and at the same time, in spite of this naïveté, she seemed to him intelligent and developed beyond her years. He could talk with her about literature, about art, about anything he liked; could complain to her of life, of people, though it sometimes happened in the middle of serious conversation she would laugh inappropriately or run away into the house. Like almost all girls of her neighbourhood, she had read a great deal (as a rule, people read very little in S—-, and at the lending library they said if it were not for the girls and the young Jews, they might as well shut up the library). This afforded Startsev infinite delight; he used to ask her eagerly every time what she had been reading the last few days, and listened enthralled while she told him.
“What have you been reading this week since I saw you last?” he asked now. “Do please tell me.”
“I have been reading Pisemsky.”
“What exactly?”
” ‘A Thousand Souls,’ “answered Kitten. “And what a funny name Pisemsky had — Alexey Feofilaktitch!
“Where are you going?” cried Startsev in horror, as she suddenly got up and walked towards the house. “I must talk to you; I want to explain myself. . . . Stay with me just five minutes, I supplicate you!”
She stopped as though she wanted to say something, then awkwardly thrust a note into his hand, ran home and sat down to the piano again.
“Be in the cemetery,” Startsev read, “at eleven o’clock to-night, near the tomb of Demetti.”
“Well, that’s not at all clever,” he thought, coming to himself. “Why the cemetery? What for?”
It was clear: Kitten was playing a prank. Who would seriously dream of making an appointment at night in the cemetery far out of the town, when it might have been arranged in the street or in the town gardens? And was it in keeping with him — a district doctor, an intelligent, staid man — to be sighing, receiving notes, to hang about cemeteries, to do silly things that even schoolboys think ridiculous nowadays? What would this romance lead to? What would his colleagues say when they heard of it? Such were Startsev’s reflections as he wandered round the tables at the club, and at half-past ten he suddenly set off for the cemetery.
By now he had his own pair of horses, and a coachman called Panteleimon, in a velvet waistcoat. The moon was shining. It was still warm, warm as it is in autumn. Dogs were howling in the suburb near the slaughter-house. Startsev left his horses in one of the side-streets at the end of the town, and walked on foot to the cemetery.
“We all have our oddities,” he thought. “Kitten is odd, too; and — who knows? — perhaps she is not joking, perhaps she will come”; and he abandoned himself to this faint, vain hope, and it intoxicated him.
He walked for half a mile through the fields; the cemetery showed as a dark streak in the distance, like a forest or a big garden. The wall of white stone came into sight, the gate. . . . In the moonlight he could read on the gate: “The hour cometh.” Startsev went in at the little gate, and before anything else he saw the white crosses and monuments on both sides of the broad avenue, and the black shadows of them and the poplars; and for a long way round it was all white and black, and the slumbering trees bowed their branches over the white stones. It seemed as though it were lighter here than in the fields; the maple-leaves stood out sharply like paws on the yellow sand of the avenue and on the stones, and the inscriptions on the tombs could be clearly read. For the first moments Startsev was struck now by what he saw for the first time in his life, and what he would probably never see again; a world not like anything else, a world in which the moonlight was as soft and beautiful, as though slumbering here in its cradle, where there was no life, none whatever; but in every dark poplar, in every tomb, there was felt the presence of a mystery that promised a life peaceful, beautiful, eternal. The stones and faded flowers, together with the autumn scent of the leaves, all told of forgiveness, melancholy, and peace.
All was silence around; the stars looked down from the sky in the profound stillness, and Startsev’s footsteps sounded loud and out of place, and only when the church clock began striking and he imagined himself dead, buried there for ever, he felt as though some one were looking at him, and for a moment he thought that it was not peace and tranquillity, but stifled despair, the dumb dreariness of non-existence. . . .
Demetti’s tomb was in the form of a shrine with an angel at the top. The Italian opera had once visited S—- and one of the singers had died; she had been buried here, and this monument put up to her. No one in the town remembered her, but the lamp at the entrance reflected the moonlight, and looked as though it were burning.
There was no one, and, indeed, who would come here at midnight? But Startsev waited, and as though the moonlight warmed his passion, he waited passionately, and, in imagination, pictured kisses and embraces. He sat near the monument for half an hour, then paced up and down the side avenues, with his hat in his hand, waiting and thinking of the many women and girls buried in these tombs who had been beautiful and fascinating, who had loved, at night burned with passion, yielding themselves to caresses. How wickedly Mother Nature jested at man’s expense, after all! How humiliating it was to recognise it!
Startsev thought this, and at the same time he wanted to cry out that he wanted love, that he was eager for it at all costs. To his eyes they were not slabs of marble, but fair white bodies in the moonlight; he saw shapes hiding bashfully in the shadows of the trees, felt their warmth, and the languor was oppressive. . . .
And as though a curtain were lowered, the moon went behind a cloud, and suddenly all was darkness. Startsev could scarcely find the gate — by now it was as dark as it is on an autumn night. Then he wandered about for an hour and a half, looking for the side-street in which he had left his horses.
“I am tired; I can scarcely stand on my legs,” he said to Panteleimon.
And settling himself with relief in his carriage, he thought: “Och! I ought not to get fat!”

III
The following evening he went to the Turkins’ to make an offer. But it turned out to be an inconvenient moment, as Ekaterina Ivanovna was in her own room having her hair done by a hair-dresser. She was getting ready to go to a dance at the club.
He had to sit a long time again in the dining-room drinking tea. Ivan Petrovitch, seeing that his visitor was bored and preoccupied, drew some notes out of his waistcoat pocket, read a funny letter from a German steward, saying that all the ironmongery was ruined and the plasticity was peeling off the walls.
“I expect they will give a decent dowry,” thought Startsev, listening absent-mindedly.
After a sleepless night, he found himself in a state of stupefaction, as though he had been given something sweet and soporific to drink; there was fog in his soul, but joy and warmth, and at the same time a sort of cold, heavy fragment of his brain was reflecting:
“Stop before it is too late! Is she the match for you? She is spoilt, whimsical, sleeps till two o’clock in the afternoon, while you are a deacon’s son, a district doctor. . . .”
“What of it?” he thought. “I don’t care.”
“Besides, if you marry her,” the fragment went on, “then her relations will make you give up the district work and live in the town.”
“After all,” he thought, “if it must be the town, the town it must be. They will give a dowry; we can establish ourselves suitably.”
At last Ekaterina Ivanovna came in, dressed for the ball, with a low neck, looking fresh and pretty; and Startsev admired her so much, and went into such ecstasies, that he could say nothing, but simply stared at her and laughed.
She began saying good-bye, and he — he had no reason for staying now — got up, saying that it was time for him to go home; his patients were waiting for him.
“Well, there’s no help for that,” said Ivan Petrovitch. “Go, and you might take Kitten to the club on the way.”
It was spotting with rain; it was very dark, and they could only tell where the horses were by Panteleimon’s husky cough. The hood of the carriage was put up.
“I stand upright; you lie down right; he lies all right,” said Ivan Petrovitch as he put his daughter into the carriage.
They drove off.
“I was at the cemetery yesterday,” Startsev began. “How ungenerous and merciless it was on your part! . . .”
“You went to the cemetery?”
“Yes, I went there and waited almost till two o’clock. I suffered . . .”
“Well, suffer, if you cannot understand a joke.”
Ekaterina Ivanovna, pleased at having so cleverly taken in a man who was in love with her, and at being the object of such intense love, burst out laughing and suddenly uttered a shriek of terror, for, at that very minute, the horses turned sharply in at the gate of the club, and the carriage almost tilted over. Startsev put his arm round Ekaterina Ivanovna’s waist; in her fright she nestled up to him, and he could not restrain himself, and passionately kissed her on the lips and on the chin, and hugged her more tightly.
“That’s enough,” she said drily.
And a minute later she was not in the carriage, and a policeman near the lighted entrance of the club shouted in a detestable voice to Panteleimon:
“What are you stopping for, you crow? Drive on.”
Startsev drove home, but soon afterwards returned. Attired in another man’s dress suit and a stiff white tie which kept sawing at his neck and trying to slip away from the collar, he was sitting at midnight in the club drawing-room, and was saying with enthusiasm to Ekaterina Ivanovna.
“Ah, how little people know who have never loved! It seems to me that no one has ever yet written of love truly, and I doubt whether this tender, joyful, agonising feeling can be described, and any one who has once experienced it would not attempt to put it into words. What is the use of preliminaries and introductions? What is the use of unnecessary fine words? My love is immeasurable. I beg, I beseech you,” Startsev brought out at last, “be my wife!”
“Dmitri Ionitch,” said Ekaterina Ivanovna, with a very grave face, after a moment’s thought — “Dmitri Ionitch, I am very grateful to you for the honour. I respect you, but . . .” she got up and continued standing, “but, forgive me, I cannot be your wife. Let us talk seriously. Dmitri Ionitch, you know I love art beyond everything in life. I adore music; I love it frantically; I have dedicated my whole life to it. I want to be an artist; I want fame, success, freedom, and you want me to go on living in this town, to go on living this empty, useless life, which has become insufferable to me. To become a wife — oh, no, forgive me! One must strive towards a lofty, glorious goal, and married life would put me in bondage for ever. Dmitri Ionitch” (she faintly smiled as she pronounced his name; she thought of “Alexey Feofilaktitch”) — “Dmitri Ionitch, you are a good, clever, honourable man; you are better than any one. . . .” Tears came into her eyes. “I feel for you with my whole heart, but . . . but you will understand. . . .”
And she turned away and went out of the drawing-room to prevent herself from crying.
Startsev’s heart left off throbbing uneasily. Going out of the club into the street, he first of all tore off the stiff tie and drew a deep breath. He was a little ashamed and his vanity was wounded — he had not expected a refusal — and could not believe that all his dreams, his hopes and yearnings, had led him up to such a stupid end, just as in some little play at an amateur performance, and he was sorry for his feeling, for that love of his, so sorry that he felt as though he could have burst into sobs or have violently belaboured Panteleimon’s broad back with his umbrella.
For three days he could not get on with anything, he could not eat nor sleep; but when the news reached him that Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away to Moscow to enter the Conservatoire, he grew calmer and lived as before.
Afterwards, remembering sometimes how he had wandered about the cemetery or how he had driven all over the town to get a dress suit, he stretched lazily and said:
“What a lot of trouble, though!”

IV
Four years had passed. Startsev already had a large practice in the town. Every morning he hurriedly saw his patients at Dyalizh, then he drove in to see his town patients. By now he drove, not with a pair, but with a team of three with bells on them, and he returned home late at night. He had grown broader and stouter, and was not very fond of walking, as he was somewhat asthmatic. And Panteleimon had grown stout, too, and the broader he grew, the more mournfully he sighed and complained of his hard luck: he was sick of driving! Startsev used to visit various households and met many people, but did not become intimate with any one. The inhabitants irritated him by their conversation, their views of life, and even their appearance. Experience taught him by degrees that while he played cards or lunched with one of these people, the man was a peaceable, friendly, and even intelligent human being; that as soon as one talked of anything not eatable, for instance, of politics or science, he would be completely at a loss, or would expound a philosophy so stupid and ill-natured that there was nothing else to do but wave one’s hand in despair and go away. Even when Startsev tried to talk to liberal citizens, saying, for instance, that humanity, thank God, was progressing, and that one day it would be possible to dispense with passports and capital punishment, the liberal citizen would look at him askance and ask him mistrustfully: “Then any one could murder any one he chose in the open street?” And when, at tea or supper, Startsev observed in company that one should work, and that one ought not to live without working, every one took this as a reproach, and began to get angry and argue aggressively. With all that, the inhabitants did nothing, absolutely nothing, and took no interest in anything, and it was quite impossible to think of anything to say. And Startsev avoided conversation, and confined himself to eating and playing vint; and when there was a family festivity in some household and he was invited to a meal, then he sat and ate in silence, looking at his plate.
And everything that was said at the time was uninteresting, unjust, and stupid; he felt irritated and disturbed, but held his tongue, and, because he sat glumly silent and looked at his plate, he was nicknamed in the town “the haughty Pole,” though he never had been a Pole.
All such entertainments as theatres and concerts he declined, but he played vint every evening for three hours with enjoyment. He had another diversion to which he took imperceptibly, little by little: in the evening he would take out of his pockets the notes he had gained by his practice, and sometimes there were stuffed in his pockets notes — yellow and green, and smelling of scent and vinegar and incense and fish oil — up to the value of seventy roubles; and when they amounted to some hundreds he took them to the Mutual Credit Bank and deposited the money there to his account.
He was only twice at the Turkins’ in the course of the four years after Ekaterina Ivanovna had gone away, on each occasion at the invitation of Vera Iosifovna, who was still undergoing treatment for migraine. Every summer Ekaterina Ivanovna came to stay with her parents, but he did not once see her; it somehow never happened.
But now four years had passed. One still, warm morning a letter was brought to the hospital. Vera Iosifovna wrote to Dmitri Ionitch that she was missing him very much, and begged him to come and see them, and to relieve her sufferings; and, by the way, it was her birthday. Below was a postscript: “I join in mother’s request.– K.”
Startsev considered, and in the evening he went to the Turkins’.
“How do you do, if you please?” Ivan Petrovitch met him, smiling with his eyes only. “Bongjour.”
Vera Iosifovna, white-haired and looking much older, shook Startsev’s hand, sighed affectedly, and said:
“You don’t care to pay attentions to me, doctor. You never come and see us; I am too old for you. But now some one young has come; perhaps she will be more fortunate.”
And Kitten? She had grown thinner, paler, had grown handsomer and more graceful; but now she was Ekaterina Ivanovna, not Kitten; she had lost the freshness and look of childish naïveté. And in her expression and manners there was something new — guilty and diffident, as though she did not feel herself at home here in the Turkins’ house.
“How many summers, how many winters!” she said, giving Startsev her hand, and he could see that her heart was beating with excitement; and looking at him intently and curiously, she went on: “How much stouter you are! You look sunburnt and more manly, but on the whole you have changed very little.”
Now, too, he thought her attractive, very attractive, but there was something lacking in her, or else something superfluous — he could not himself have said exactly what it was, but something prevented him from feeling as before. He did not like her pallor, her new expression, her faint smile, her voice, and soon afterwards he disliked her clothes, too, the low chair in which she was sitting; he disliked something in the past when he had almost married her. He thought of his love, of the dreams and the hopes which had troubled him four years before — and he felt awkward.
They had tea with cakes. Then Vera Iosifovna read aloud a novel; she read of things that never happen in real life, and Startsev listened, looked at her handsome grey head, and waited for her to finish.
People are not stupid because they can’t write novels, but because they can’t conceal it when they do,” he thought.
“Not badsome,” said Ivan Petrovitch.
Then Ekaterina Ivanovna played long and noisily on the piano, and when she finished she was profusely thanked and warmly praised.
“It’s a good thing I did not marry her,” thought Startsev.
She looked at him, and evidently expected him to ask her to go into the garden, but he remained silent.
“Let us have a talk,” she said, going up to him. “How are you getting on? What are you doing? How are things? I have been thinking about you all these days,” she went on nervously. “I wanted to write to you, wanted to come myself to see you at Dyalizh. I quite made up my mind to go, but afterwards I thought better of it. God knows what your attitude is towards me now; I have been looking forward to seeing you to-day with such emotion. For goodness’ sake let us go into the garden.”
They went into the garden and sat down on the seat under the old maple, just as they had done four years before. It was dark.
“How are you getting on?” asked Ekaterina Ivanovna.
“Oh, all right; I am jogging along,” answered Startsev.
And he could think of nothing more. They were silent.
“I feel so excited!” said Ekaterina Ivanovna, and she hid her face in her hands. “But don’t pay attention to it. I am so happy to be at home; I am so glad to see every one. I can’t get used to it. So many memories! I thought we should talk without stopping till morning.”
Now he saw her face near, her shining eyes, and in the darkness she looked younger than in the room, and even her old childish expression seemed to have come back to her. And indeed she was looking at him with naïve curiosity, as though she wanted to get a closer view and understanding of the man who had loved her so ardently, with such tenderness, and so unsuccessfully; her eyes thanked him for that love. And he remembered all that had been, every minute detail; how he had wandered about the cemetery, how he had returned home in the morning exhausted, and he suddenly felt sad and regretted the past. A warmth began glowing in his heart.
“Do you remember how I took you to the dance at the club?” he asked. “It was dark and rainy then. . .”
The warmth was glowing now in his heart, and he longed to talk, to rail at life. . . .
“Ech!” he said with a sigh. “You ask how I am living. How do we live here? Why, not at all. We grow old, we grow stout, we grow slack. Day after day passes; life slips by without colour, without expressions, without thoughts. . . . In the daytime working for gain, and in the evening the club, the company of card-players, alcoholic, raucous-voiced gentlemen whom I can’t endure. What is there nice in it?”
“Well, you have work — a noble object in life. You used to be so fond of talking of your hospital. I was such a queer girl then; I imagined myself such a great pianist. Nowadays all young ladies play the piano, and I played, too, like everybody else, and there was nothing special about me. I am just such a pianist as my mother is an authoress. And of course I didn’t understand you then, but afterwards in Moscow I often thought of you. I thought of no one but you. What happiness to be a district doctor; to help the suffering; to be serving the people! What happiness!” Ekaterina Ivanovna repeated with enthusiasm. “When I thought of you in Moscow, you seemed to me so ideal, so lofty. . . .”
Startsev thought of the notes he used to take out of his pockets in the evening with such pleasure, and the glow in his heart was quenched.
He got up to go into the house. She took his arm.
“You are the best man I’ve known in my life,” she went on. “We will see each other and talk, won’t we? Promise me. I am not a pianist; I am not in error about myself now, and I will not play before you or talk of music.”
When they had gone into the house, and when Startsev saw in the lamplight her face, and her sad, grateful, searching eyes fixed upon him, he felt uneasy and thought again:
“It’s a good thing I did not marry her then.”
He began taking leave.
“You have no human right to go before supper,” said Ivan Petrovitch as he saw him off. “It’s extremely perpendicular on your part. Well, now, perform!” he added, addressing Pava in the hall.
Pava, no longer a boy, but a young man with moustaches, threw himself into an attitude, flung up his arm, and said in a tragic voice:
“Unhappy woman, die!”
All this irritated Startsev. Getting into his carriage, and looking at the dark house and garden which had once been so precious and so dear, he thought of everything at once — Vera Iosifovna’s novels and Kitten’s noisy playing, and Ivan Petrovitch’s jokes and Pava’s tragic posturing, and thought if the most talented people in the town were so futile, what must the town be?
Three days later Pava brought a letter from Ekaterina Ivanovna.
“You don’t come and see us — why?” she wrote to him. “I am afraid that you have changed towards us. I am afraid, and I am terrified at the very thought of it. Reassure me; come and tell me that everything is well.
“I must talk to you.– Your E. I.”
—-
He read this letter, thought a moment, and said to Pava:
“Tell them, my good fellow, that I can’t come to-day; I am very busy. Say I will come in three days or so.”
But three days passed, a week passed; he still did not go. Happening once to drive past the Turkins’ house, he thought he must go in, if only for a moment, but on second thoughts . . . did not go in.
And he never went to the Turkins’ again.

V
Several more years have passed. Startsev has grown stouter still, has grown corpulent, breathes heavily, and already walks with his head thrown back. When stout and red in the face, he drives with his bells and his team of three horses, and Panteleimon, also stout and red in the face with his thick beefy neck, sits on the box, holding his arms stiffly out before him as though they were made of wood, and shouts to those he meets: “Keep to the ri-i-ight!” it is an impressive picture; one might think it was not a mortal, but some heathen deity in his chariot. He has an immense practice in the town, no time to breathe, and already has an estate and two houses in the town, and he is looking out for a third more profitable; and when at the Mutual Credit Bank he is told of a house that is for sale, he goes to the house without ceremony, and, marching through all the rooms, regardless of half-dressed women and children who gaze at him in amazement and alarm, he prods at the doors with his stick, and says:
“Is that the study? Is that a bedroom? And what’s here?”
And as he does so he breathes heavily and wipes the sweat from his brow.
He has a great deal to do, but still he does not give up his work as district doctor; he is greedy for gain, and he tries to be in all places at once. At Dyalizh and in the town he is called simply “Ionitch”: “Where is Ionitch off to?” or “Should not we call in Ionitch to a consultation?”
Probably because his throat is covered with rolls of fat, his voice has changed; it has become thin and sharp. His temper has changed, too: he has grown ill-humoured and irritable. When he sees his patients he is usually out of temper; he impatiently taps the floor with his stick, and shouts in his disagreeable voice:
“Be so good as to confine yourself to answering my questions! Don’t talk so much!”
He is solitary. He leads a dreary life; nothing interests him.
During all the years he had lived at Dyalizh his love for Kitten had been his one joy, and probably his last. In the evenings he plays vint at the club, and then sits alone at a big table and has supper. Ivan, the oldest and most respectable of the waiters, serves him, hands him Lafitte No. 17, and every one at the club — the members of the committee, the cook and waiters — know what he likes and what he doesn’t like and do their very utmost to satisfy him, or else he is sure to fly into a rage and bang on the floor with his stick.
As he eats his supper, he turns round from time to time and puts in his spoke in some conversation:
“What are you talking about? Eh? Whom?”
And when at a neighbouring table there is talk of the Turkins, he asks:
“What Turkins are you speaking of? Do you mean the people whose daughter plays on the piano?”
That is all that can be said about him.
And the Turkins? Ivan Petrovitch has grown no older; he is not changed in the least, and still makes jokes and tells anecdotes as of old. Vera Iosifovna still reads her novels aloud to her visitors with eagerness and touching simplicity. And Kitten plays the piano for four hours every day. She has grown visibly older, is constantly ailing, and every autumn goes to the Crimea with her mother. When Ivan Petrovitch sees them off at the station, he wipes his tears as the train starts, and shouts:
“Good-bye, if you please.”
And he waves his handkerchief.

NOTES
Ascension Day: the day 40 days after Easter when Christ is supposed to have gone to heaven
goblet: song with words from the poem “An Elegy” by Anton A. Delvig (1798-1831)
Othello: title character of Shakespeare’s play; example of an unjustly jealous husband
Petit Jean: Chekhov uses the word Zhanchik which is the French name Jean, plus a Russian-type diminutive
Die, Denis; you won’t write anything better: remark made to playwright Denis I. Fonvizin by Potemkin after a performance of the play The Brigadier
caressing: from the first lines of Pushkin’s poem “Night” (1823)
A Thousand Souls: a novel (1858) by Alexis F. Pisemsky (1820-1881); the author’s patronymic would nowadays be written “Feofilaktovich,” and it does sound funny to Russians
The hour cometh: John 5:28, “for the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice”
vint: a bridge-like card game
yellow and green: one rouble notes were yellow and three rouble notes were green

GATEs always open for me

Maybe doors shut on me, but GATEs always open!!

gate 2016 scorecard

I know it’s not an extraordinary score and is nothing to brag about. But, in my defense, I was unprepared. I had only a month to prepare, that also along with a job. I appeared in GATE only for fun, but still, it matters to me. Still rank of 1190 out of 108 thousand candidates is not bad. For, it’s my way to express my love for computer science.

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