"Occupation has no place in a civilized society. It is time Palestine redeemed freedom from Israeli occupation, Scotland from British occupation, and Jammu and Kashmir from Indian occupation." Hometown Human is a work of valor and expansion in our struggle against narrowness, recklessness and human rights violations. In his usual bold and simple words Naskar states: "Power to people doesn't mean power, it means responsibility."

In this splendid book, one of America's masters of nonfiction takes us home--into Hometown, U.S.A., the town of Northampton, Massachusetts, and into the extraordinary, and the ordinary, lives that people live there. As Tracy Kidder reveals how, beneath its amiable surface, a small town is a place of startling complexity, he also explores what it takes to make a modern small city a success story. Weaving together compelling stories of individual lives, delving into a rich and varied past, moving among all the levels of Northampton's social hierarchy, Kidder reveals the sheer abundance of life contained within a town's narrow boundaries. Does the kind of small town that many Americans came from, and long for, still exist? Kidder says yes, although not quite in the form we may imagine. A book about civilization in microcosm, Home Town makes us marvel afresh at the wonder of individuality, creativity, and civic order--how a disparate group of individuals can find common cause and a code of values that transforms a place into a home. And this book makes you feel you live there.

Describes the everyday workings of a seemingly typical American hometown and reveals the complex drama behind the lives of its residents.

"Divisionism and dollarism are the curse of society, yet society worships them as the greatest boon. Peace and peoplism are cussed as commie claptrap, while populism continues to give power to goons." Planet Earth's foremost giant of humanitarianism Abhijit Naskar gives us a string of hundred sonnets for a world without discrimination, disparity and division. With his usual simplicity he says: "Suits and boots are not sentience, Manners and etiquettes are not culture. Intellect and technology are not progress, Faith and tradition are not character."

Starting in 1911, and for many years, the Alberta Hospital Ponoka, or AHP, was the largest and highest-population psychiatric institution in the Western Canadian Province of Alberta. It was also located on the outskirts of Jack Martin’s hometown, and his father was employed there, which means that its story and Martin’s intersect in varied and interesting ways. In Hometown Asylum, Martin explores the Hospital’s history, along with some of his own. In this journey, Martin considers past and contemporary issues in mental health services and treatments from the perspectives of those receiving them, those attempting to provide them, and the citizens whose attitudes and tax dollars inevitably guide and contribute to these efforts. In telling the history of the Alberta Hospital Ponoka, this book describes a wide and varied range of treatments for those suffering mental disorders, and examines how societies, past and present, have responded to the challenges of caring for them. As a part of this, Martin raises questions about the nature of mental illness, the efficacy and ethics of treatments offered, the rights of the mentally ill, and the obligations and manner of their care.

Collective remittances, that is to say development initiatives carried out by immigrant groups for the benefit of their place of origin, have been attracting growing attention from both academics and policy makers. Focusing on hometown organisations, this book analyses the social mechanics that are conducive to collective transnationalism.

“Friday Azaan and Sunday Choir, All pray to the same light. Yet in our divisive stupidity, We use it as excuse to maintain divide. Secularism has three stages. First, you realize, all religions pray to the same God. Second, you realize, God exists only in the human heart. Finally, all talk of God disappears, and what remains among the humans, is a natural sense of oneness.” Thus speaks planet earth's humanitarian armor.