Kerala was celebrated as a Paradise Found – one of the ten in the world. A perfect description for a land renowned as God’s Own Country.What adds to the charm of its backwaters, beaches, Ayurvedic health holidays, hill stations, wildlife,festivals, monuments and vibrant art forms, is its amazing social development indicates that are on par with the developed world. Kerala is a very easy place to simply sit back and enjoy. The name means “land of coconuts” and the palms shade nearly the entire state from the tropical sun; many call the beach at Kovalam the best in India; visitors can spend a day riding small ferries through the backwater lagoons or watching elephants cavort in the wildlife sanctuaries; the spicy food may be the best vegetarian cuisine on the planet.

But the real reason to visit Kerala, which lies at the south western tip of the subcontinent, is for the intellectual adventure: Kerala is a bizarre anomaly among developing nations, a place that offers real hope for the future of the Third World. Its literacy rates among the highest on the earth. Though mostly a land of paddy-covered plains, statistically Kerala stands out, as the Mount Everest of social development, there’s truly no place like it.

In the mornings, from nearly anywhere in Kerala, you can hear loud music from the hindu temples, wailing muezzins at the mosques, and church bells ringing at the cathedrals. Religious tolerance is just one reason for Kerala’s success. The state government has effected sweeping land reforms and spends almost half of its budget on health and education. Kerala is a place to meander: simply take a car from trivandrum or cochin out to almost any village and spend a day wandering the dikes between the rice paddies and rubber trees, seeing how half the world still lives, men and women stooping to cut rice with sickles, or spreading coconut along the road to dry, water buffalo wallowing in the irrigation ditches, every inch of ground cultivated. Every small field lined with palms. A place where little is wasted. It’s also a place that works and in poor, rural Asia, that alone would make Kerala a paradise. The breeze rustling the palm fronds is just a bonus.