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Quand je suis arrivé à Varanasi en octobre 2018 avec le projet de réaliser un livre sur l’ONG Action Bénarès, je connaissais déjà l’association, sur laquelle j’avais écrit un article il y a plusieurs années. Cette fois, l’idée initiale était de faire un documentaire télévisé pour lui venir en aide. Le projet n’ayant pu aboutir, je me suis dit qu’un livre serait plus aisément réalisable. Quand je suis arrivé sur place, je dois reconnaître que je n’avais pas d’idée bien arrêtée sur ce que serait c…

Haut lieu de dévotion pour les Shiks, le Harmandir Sahib, « l’Illustre temple de Dieu », est plus connu sous le nom de « Temple d'Or ». Il est situé au coeur de la ville d'Amritsar dans l'Etat du Punjâb, au nord-ouest de l'Inde, à quelques kilomètres de la frontière pakistanaise.

Ils travaillent entre 3000 et 5300 mètres d’altitude. Mal équipés et mal payés, au péril de leur vie, les ouvriers des Travaux publics indiens, sous le contrôle de l’armée, ont pour mission de maintenir ouverte la seule route sécurisée qui mène au Ladakh. Un axe vital emprunté six mois par an par des milliers de chauffeurs routiers. Des trompe-la mort, sans lesquels aucune activité économique ne serait possible dans cet État du nord de l’Inde. Une région par ailleurs hautement stratégique, coincée entre la Chine et le Pakistan. Pays avec lesquels l’Inde a toujours entretenu des relations conflictuelles. * Article rédigé en 2013

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Server overload update. Access to our website is somewhat improved from the days of unhelpful error messages, but as our servers are still overloaded by bots the team continues to work on finding a solution to the delayed loading of pages. What the team has done: 1) See the previously published article . 2) A new firewall has been installed and with a few updates to the settings, error messages no longer appear and so there has…

[Edit 8/6/2025: The loading of pages is back to normal speeds] Currently our club’s beloved ipernity website varies in accessibility. You may notice times with basically no access, times with very slow loading times and other times when it works quickly. There doesn’t appear to be any regular pattern to these disruptions. As noted before, these overloads are caused by excessive requests accessing our servers. These may be from the new AI bots that since March 2025 now have software t…

The Ipernity platform functions much like a great rainforest. Each night, shortly after midnight, the servers clear, the systems refresh, and the site hums with renewed energy. In these early hours, Ipernity runs fast and clean, like dry air beginning to gather moisture. As users upload photos, exchange likes, and leave comments, they saturate the digital atmosphere with activity. Gradually, as the hours pass, this accumulated load begins to weigh heavy. Latency creeps in like rising humidi…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Interruptions to our website. As many of you know, we have been suffering recently from slow response times to actual failure to load a page. When this happens to you, please be patient and wait a minute or two before trying to refresh the page, because the site is not offline, just overloaded. This is due to high demand on our system from outside. This has also been causing other types of issues including interruption of daily news emails an…

My membership of Ipernity is now in its sixth year. I came to Ipernity at a time when the increasing commercialization of existing photo sites and/or communities was increasingly limiting my creativity. Trendy photos were highlighted, while the real treasures remained hidden. This is not surprising, the operators of these sites are profit-oriented, but they live from our work and our enthusiasm. They create a presentation space – but nothing more than that. I came to Ipernity, a real communit…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Is a group active? In order to support the current efforts by our members to improve the perception of groups, especially to visitors, a new feature has been added to assist them. On a group's homepage, the blue (?) icon beside 'Latest contributions' shows how long ago the most recent image was added to the group. Additionally, this is available via the [ i ] under each image. This is the date that a user agrees to a suggestion, or when a g…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Additional viewing size option. When viewing group contributions, the 'Small' option displayed the 100px images. Everywhere else, the display used the cropped 75px squares. Beside the existing icon for this option, now labeled 'Square', there is a new icon for the 100px option, labeled 'Small'. The view of group contributions gains the 'Square' option, which provides a larger overview of the content. The Explore->Gallery and Explore->Noteworthy d…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Notes for new members. It was a task for the Moderator to send an ipermail to new members with useful information. This would inevitably not be at the instant of registration. It also required a decision on who to exclude as likely spammers. The text is now available in our 7 supported languages, as item 1.6 in the FAQ section. We view this as an overall improvement, while accepting the loss of the personal touch. This is mitigated by community bein…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, ============================ For those of you still having problems: If trying to add a new photo to a group, and there is no drop-down list, the first thing to try is the Ctrl+F5 to Refresh. See paragraph below for more about refreshing. If that does not solve the problem, you can try closing and restarting your browser . We do not expect to be able to allow the apps (iPhone or Android) to upload photos. But this is possible with either the…

Executive Board (elected by the Ipernity General Assembly on March 25, 2023 and April 7, 2024) William Sutherland , United States, President Corinne Pommerell , Luxemburg, Treasurer Rob Stamp , United Kingdom, Webmaster Laura Fletcher , United States, Moderator Executive Assistants ( appointed by the Executive Board in accordance with ARTICLE VII,10 of the IMA Statutes ) Helena-Paule Fitoussi , France (hotline, spam removal) Stefan Roßkopf , Germany (IT) S…

We look forward to the members confirming these appointments at the IGA. In reply to our call for candidatures for the mandates of Vice President and Treasurer, one person has come forward: No one has come forward for Vice-President. Corinne Pommerell - as Treasurer. Current incumbent, standing for re-election The ima team therefore proposes to the General Assembly as candidate: 1) Vice-President - none 2) Treasurer Cori…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) One month until IGA. Sign up by April 3rd in order to attend. Our annual membership meeting will be held online on Sunday April 7th 2024, 5pm [Correction: 6pm] Paris (16:00 UTC) . Please see Sign-Up Procedure for IGA . For anyone who has not attended previously, a look at the IGA group will give you an idea of how the meeting is conducted online. There are two mandates open for election. 2) Meeting in the real world. We are inde…

New-Delhi (Inde) - La municipalité de new-Delhi a réussi à exproprier la totalité des 2.700 familles d’artistes de rue qui vivaient dans la colonie du bidonville de Kathputli, située à l’Ouest de Delhi. Les artistes ont bien tenté de résister, faisant prendre plusieurs années de retard au projet de modernisation urbaine, mais aujourd’hui, les promoteurs ont gagné.

La région du Dhanbad dans l’Etat du Jharkhand, est la capitale indienne du charbon. Les compagnies minières y exploitent d’immenses mines à ciel ouvert. Entre les engins mécaniques qui ravagent la nature environnante, les mineurs illégaux, qui résident dans les villages à proximité des mines, tentent de récupérer quelques miettes de ce charbon pour survivre. Tous souffrent de maladies respiratoires chroniques ; mais il faut bien vivre et le charbon est à portée de main.

The beginning is brilliant, a remake of "2001: The Space Odyssey", by Stanley KUBRICK, promises a film speaking of the future of a better humanity. But then it touches on many things at the same time, inequality between sexes, consumerism, overspending, love, beauty versus ugliness and intelligence, youth versus aging, life verssus death, it touches on it all, sometimes masterfully, other times hastily. At the end, the idea remains that the movie is honest and pretends to be moralistic, b…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Next season. Summer is around the corner and the summer collection of homepage pictures and accompanying slideshow are online. See the slideshow on YouTube , and without logging out, see the ipernity homepage here. A deep thank you to all members who have added new contributions which keeps our website looking fresh. Keep those suggestions coming! And the team gives many thanks to Bernhard and * ઇઉ * for all the hard work t…

Dear members and friends of ipernity, 1) Picture-in-picture (PiPs) in lightbox. The full screen 'Lightbox view [z]' now displays PiPs. It does not allow you to edit your own PiPs, but the feature is designed to help you be aware of PiPs when viewing other people's photos. The outline rectangles appear as you move the mouse, and then fade out when you stop moving the mouse. This is unlike the main photo page where they are always visible when the mouse is over the photo. The rectangle…