Several dates available in July, August and September 2010 Despite being sandwiched between two super-powers, India and China, Bhutan retains a unique Buddhist culture and offers some of the best trekking of all the Himalayan kingdoms.
Bhutan arm bracelet, late 19th century, silver and amber.
Meanwhile, some of the world's poorer states do comparatively well: Botswana, Bhutan, Cape Verde, and Rwanda all appear among the 50 "cleanest" countries.
From Galle in Sri Lanka to the mountains of Bhutan and from the towers of Karachi to the beaches of Goa, the subcontinent is crawling with authors, thinkers and their hangers-on.
Its national team is ranked 206th in the world, above only Bhutan, San Marino and the Turks & Caicos Islands; its record since its first match in 1997 is played 28, won two.
This corner of Assam, situated north of the Brahmaputra river, where India's plains rise up into the foothills of the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, has been embroiled in a decades-old struggle for statehood by Assam's largest tribe, the Bodo (pronounced Boro).A convoy of military vehicles drives along National Highway 52, which leads towards Udalguri from Guwahati.
Security has improved in the past year or so, a result of co-ordinated campaigns against the separatists' bases in neighbouring Bhutan and Bangladesh.
Bhutan, squeezed between two giants, agreed in 1949 that its policy would be "guided" by one of them, India.
Bhutan's experiment, in this view, also offers important lessons to other poor countries.For critics, however, GNH is at best an empty slogan one that risks "including everything and ending up meaning nothing", in the words of Dorji Penjor of the Centre for Bhutan Studies, the think-tank that held the conference in February.
Indeed, Bhutan is embracing it, and trying to join the World Trade Organisation.
For its adherents, it offers a guide to policy that will enable Bhutan to pick and choose in the globalisation supermarket, modernising on its terms alone.
