Pohela Boishakh 1415(Bangla New Year)

New Year's festivities are closely linked with rural life in Bengal. Usually on Poila Boishakh, the home is thoroughly scrubbed and cleaned; people bathe early in the morning and dress in fine clothes. They spend much of the day visiting relatives, friends, and neighbours. Special foods are prepared to entertain guests. This is one rural festival that has become enormously big in the cities, especially in Dhaka.

Boishakhi fairs are arranged in many parts of the country. Various agricultural products, traditional handicrafts, toys, cosmetics, as well as various kinds of food and sweets are sold at these fairs. The fairs also provide entertainment, with singers and dancers staging jatra (traditional plays), pala gan, kobigan, jarigan, gambhira gan, gazir gan and alkap gan. They present folk songs as well as baul, marfati, murshidi and bhatiali songs. Narrative plays like Laily-Majnu, Yusuf-Zulekha and Radha-Krishna are staged. Among other attractions of these fairs are puppet shows and merry-go-rounds.

Many old festivals connected with New Year's Day have disappeared, while new festivals have been added. With the abolition of the zamindari system, the punya connected with the closing of land revenue accounts has disappeared. Kite flying in Dhaka and bull racing in Munshiganj used to be very colourful events. Other popular village games and sports were horse races, bullfights, cockfights, flying pigeons, and boat racing. Some festivals, however, continue to be observed; for example, bali (wrestling) in Chittagong and gambhira in Rajshahi are still popular events.

Observance of Poila Boishakh has become popular in the cities. Early in the morning, people gather under a big tree or on the bank of a lake to witness the sunrise. Artists present songs to usher in the new year. People from all walks of life wear traditional Bengali attire: young women wear white saris with red borders, and adorn themselves with churi bangles, ful flowers, and tip (bindis). Men wear white paejama (pants) or lungi(dhoti/dhuti) (long skirt) and kurta (tunic). Many townspeople start the day with the traditional breakfast of panta bhat (rice soaked in water), green chillies, onion, and fried hilsa fish.

The most colourful new year's day festival takes place in Dhaka. Large numbers of people gather early in the morning under the banyan tree at Ramna Park where Chhayanat artists open the day with Rabindranath Tagore's famous song, Esho, he Boishakh, Esho Esho (Come, O Boishakh, Come, Come). A similar ceremony welcoming the new year is also held at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. Students and teachers of the institute take out a colourful procession and parade round the campus. Social and cultural organisations celebrate the day with cultural programmes. Newspapers bring out special supplements. There are also special programmes on radio and television.

The historical importance of Poila Baishakh in the Bangladeshi context may be dated from the observance of the day by Chhayanat in 1965. In an attempt to suppress Bengali culture, the Pakistani Government had banned poems written by Rabindranath Tagore, the most famous poet and writer in Bengali literature. Protesting this move, Chhayanat opened their Poila Boishakh celebrations at Ramna Park with Tagore's song welcoming the month. The day continued to be celebrated in East Pakistan as a symbol of Bengali culture. After 1972 it became a national festival, a symbol of the Bangladesh nationalist movement and an integral part of the people's cultural heritage. Later, in the mid- 1980s the Institute of Fine Arts added colour to the day by initiating the Boishakhi parade, which is much like a carnival parade.

** Photo From 123greetings.com

Microsoft To Mainstream Containerized Data Centers With C-Blox

The server-packed shipping units allow Microsoft to run its entire $500 million Northlake facility with a continuous staff of little more than 20 or 30 employees.

For all the talk Sun Microsystems (NSDQ: JAVA) and Rackable raised about building data centers from stacks of shipping containers, another company, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), is finally delivering one of the first real case studies by building a container-based data center itself.

Several companies have come out with containerized data center products, including Sun's MD S20 (formerly known as Project Blackbox), Rackable's Integrated Concerto Environment Cube (ICE Cube), and Verari's Forest. These have been largely marketed as products suited for portable data center needs and disaster recovery and as additions to existing data centers, but Microsoft is taking a more comprehensive approach.

The first floor of Microsoft's $500 million Northlake, Ill., data center, which is currently under construction, will house between 150 and 220 industry-standard 40-foot shipping containers holding between 1,000 and 2,000 physical servers apiece, or somewhere between 150,000 and 440,000 servers in total. According to Microsoft general manager of data center services Michael Manos, that's as many as 11 times the number of servers a conventional data center that size would have.

"We really look at containers as an opportunity to increase scale and drive even more efficiency into our data centers," Manos said in an interview. "We've upped the unit of storage from one server to a rack of servers to a container."

Microsoft has developed its own specifications that include, for example, configuration for electrical components and the layout of physical servers, for its containers. Those specs make Microsoft's containers different from anything on the market today, and a potential opportunity for future Microsoft products. The containers, which Microsoft calls C-blox, are largely self-contained and will require very little hands-on maintenance.

"The doors are closed, and because of the level of automation in our systems, we can run it and accept a certain amount of failure over time," Manos said. Manos argues that it is more cost effective to build redundancy and automation into Microsoft's data center applications and allow some hardware to fail than it would be to physically manage such a large data center. The hands-off approach also means design can be tweaked to allow for maximum cooling and energy efficiency without worrying about how accessible the systems are to human hands. Of course, Microsoft also builds backbones that link power, cooling, and bandwidth among the containers.

In the C-blox world, a truck drops off a data center container and then picks it up again in a few years when Microsoft is ready to switch over to new hardware. Administrators will only enter the physical C-blox in the rarest of occasions. "In that sense, your IT workers look more like truckers and longshoremen than traditional IT workers," Manos said. It will also allow Microsoft to run the entire Northlake facility with a continuous staff of little more than 20 or 30 employees.

Manos admitted that despite huge interest from hundreds of people after he gave a keynote address at Data Center World last week, containerized data centers aren't for every company. Microsoft's own deployment relies on a highly automated, virtualized infrastructure and substantial monitoring and management tools in order to be so hands-off. The data centers automatically provision and reprovision virtual servers and even heal themselves when problems occur. For most companies, such extensive virtualization and automation remains little more than a multiyear plan, not a reality.

"If you think about the applications, you really have to do a pretty significant analysis on containers," he said. "Can your apps survive significant degradation over time, what are the latencies between applications, and can you drive your infrastructure to really make use of these things? There's a lot of applications that don't make sense, and there's a pretty introspective analysis needed."

Despite the warnings, one thing Microsoft can do is legitimize by example that a company can use shipping containers to build an entire data center, rather than just using them as supplemental server capacity. And that's exactly what it has set out to do.

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