Mana Shah - Facilitator

Usually it takes me atleast a few days if not weeks to complete a book. But this one, took just a day. Disclaimer: I am a firm believer and follower of checklists and todos to the point that my memory is completely handicapped without one! So when I picked up Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto , I was pretty sure that I would understand his logic and reason for dedicating a whole book to a mundane thing as a checklist. His book demonstrates the successes in terms of life-saving, effectiveness and efficiency across professions from those in which split second decisions can decide the fate of someone's life and time is a luxury to others where one can spend as much time as needed to create perfection. Medicine, aviation and disaster relief to architecture and construction, restuaurant business, music industry.... How does one build a 100-storey building without accident or how does one produce 300 mouth watering perfect dishes in four hours or how does one assure safety of...

Despite all the pleasures of seeing new sites, one annoyance that I least look forward to is the rush of tourist guides that surround and hound you. Usually these would be young dudes who claim to show you all the sites at a very enticing price. Recently at Jaipur, we were also approached by "government approved" tourist guides with even a proper name tag. The dilemma facing the average Indian tourist seems quite serious: do you choose the government guide who has a fixed charge or you choose the unlicensed young dude at sometimes even half the price? If you look at the service that these guides provide, its basically history of the particular monument and if you are lucky some additional stories as a value addition! The guides also differentiates their service as per language, we could hear guides rattling off Japanese, Spanish, German...you name it. A new competitor on the scene-the audio guide-is also giving taking away some (not that much as audio guides are largely prefe...