Onam : The Festival of Joy

Onam

Onam is one of the most important festival of Kerala. It is a bright and colorful festival that celebrates the bounties of nature and a year of good harvest. The festival stretches on for ten days - days filled with feasting, boat racing, singing and dancing. Rituals along with new clothes, traditional cuisine, dance, and music mark this harvest festival.

Legends

According to the legends, Kerala was ruled by the Demon King Mahabali. The Gods feared that he might become too powerful, so they approached Lord Vishnu, to curb Mahabali’s power. Lord Vishnu took the form of Vaamana, the dwarf and approached Mahabali. He asked the good King for three paces of land. King Mahabali granted three paces of land to Vaamana. At that, the dwarf grew in height till he almost touched the sky. With his first step, he measured the heavens, with his second, the nether world.
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Windows.NET—what’s that?

Windows.NET will be the next server release from Microsoft. Here are a few features that are expected to debut in this OS:

* Larger memory support—memory block move and copy will improve performance.
* Application domain—applications are protected from each other.
* Common Language Runtime—will be bundled with the OS.
* IIS (Microsoft’s Web server software) moves into the kernel—this will improve performance but the chances of IIS bringing the server down will rise.

Why .NET?

Daniel Ingitaraj, senior marketing manager at Microsoft India says, “Class libraries are the same across languages. Earlier, ADO was always connected—it assumed the existence of a LAN. ADO.NET assumes a disconnected world (dial-up Internet).”

“Once you use pointers, you are out of .NET. C# marks pointer code as unsafe,” adds Ingitaraj. “ASP was traditionally easy to write but difficult to manage. There was no concept of reusing code, no Object-Oriented features, no caching. In ASP.NET there is a new file extension—.aspx. On the first run, the aspx is compiled and stored for future use—a DLL is created. If there is a change in the aspx source file, the CLR recompiles it,” says Ingitaraj.
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What are Weblogs?

Weblogs are Web pages built by real people, blessedly free of corporate-speak and ubiquitous images of tall-shiny skyscrapers, smiley people gazing intelligently into laptops, or besuited, smarmy business-types shaking hands. Weblogs — logs of the Web, see? — are the where the real action is. They are the creation of individuals, usually musings on national, local or personal events, links to interesting articles, a few lines of comment or discussion collected and presented by one person. While not sounding like much, Weblogs are a milestone in the short history of the Internet.

Part of a blog’s charm is its simplicity. In most cases it’s plain text simply but elegantly laid out. Pages are quick to load. The content is concise and measured. The more you read a blog you like and the closer you feel to its author, the more you will trust their choice and follow the links offered. While for some people the appeal of the more personal blogs is in connecting with others through a kind of virtual diary of one’s thoughts and observations, for others the more straightforward digest of recent news — and the blogger’s interpretation and comment on that news — serves a more prosaic purpose. Above all, it’s free.
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A Brief Biography of Atanu Dey

Atanu Dey is a Senior VP at Netcore Solutions, Mumbai. His primary focus in on the use of information and communications technology tools in secondary and post-secondary education. He has worked in product marketing at Hewlett Packard in California for several years. He received his PhD in economics from University of California at Berkeley. He holds masters degrees in computer science from IIT Kanpur and Rutgers University, and a mechanical engineering degree from Nagpur University. While a Reuters Fellow at Stanford University (2001-02), he coauthored a model for rural development called RISC with Vinod Khosla. In his spare time (about 90% of his total time) he listens to classical music, practices Vipassana meditation, reads physics, gives lectures on Buddhism, maintains a sporadic blog, and occassionally makes sense. He plans to become a philosopher when he grows up. He would also like all to know that he is a published poet.

Check out Atanu’s blog on development issues.

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The First Poster boy of the Net : Rajesh Jain

If Sabeer Bhatia hit iconic status among Internet entrepreneurs in the US, Rajesh Jain achieved similar status back home when he sold his IndiaWorld portal to Satyam Infoway(now Sify) in 1999 for Rs 500 crore. That was one of the Asia’s largest Internet deals. This astounding deal, amid the Internet boom, sparked off the dotcom frenzy in India. Everyone wanted to be Rajesh Jain.

Rajesh Jain’s Biography::
A graduate from IIT-Mumbai, Jain completed his masters in electrical engineering (communications) from Columbia University. He worked in the US for two years before coming back to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.
Before fame and money embraced Jain he swallowed many failures. His foray into software development failed, forcing him to take a break in the US in 1994. Fascinated by the power of the Internet, he started IndiaWorld, a Web-based news and information service for NRIs, with his savings.
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Thoughts to keep u thinking!

We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole that makes the wagon move.

We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space that makes it livable.

Posted in Timepass | 1 Comment »

Mother Mary’s holy girdle to be on display

The St Peter’s Jacobite Syrian Church at Mit Chowky will display a part of the girdle of Mother Mary to devotees from Sept 1 to 8. This church houses the Soonoro (a portion of the holy girdle of Mother Mary).

According to Mathew Thomas, secretary of the Parish Youth Association of St Peter’s Jacobite Church, “The girdle is said to have been in the possession of the apostle St Thomas who brought it to India.

In 394 AD, together with the coffin of St Thomas, the girdle also moved from India to Syria and was kept in a church there.”

The girdle stayed in the possession of the Syrian Orthodox Church, but over a period of time, the church lost track of the holy relic. In April 1953, Ignatius Aphrem, the supreme head of the Syrian Orthodox Church, found a letter that revealed the location of the girdle.

In 1982, during the Apostolic visit of His Holiness, Ignatius Zakka II Patriarch to Malankara, Kerala, he brought a portion of the girdle and installed it in many churches in Malankara. All these churches became places of pilgrimage later.

Thomas adds, “His Holiness Moran Mor Ignatius Zakka II then brought a part of the girdle to St Peter’s Church. It is the only church outside Kerala where the Soonoro has been installed.”

The Soonoro is opened for public veneration once a year on Sept 1 and displayed during Ettunombu — an eight-day period of fasting that lasts until Sept 8, the birthday of Mother Mary. On that day, the casket housing the girdle will be taken out of the shrine and devotees will be allowed to venerate it.

St Peter’s Church
Mit Chowky
Marve Road
Call 28612121 / 55425436

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