Dancer’s Trail. Image credit: Author
WHAT TO SHOW ON A TOUR
NEED FOR EXPERTS
How do you design a tour? You pick a place that you want to showcase and then go around looking for points of interest there. Right? That’s how sight-seeing tours have always been designed. But what if you started by identifying the stories you wanted to share; stories that have a strong connect to the place being talked about and stories that give that place its unique character? And then you looked around for places or activities that would help set a context? We do it all the time. So we don’t have a Mylapore walk. We offer a Peacock trail, which uses the everyday sights in Mylapore as props. We also do a Jewellery trail in the same neighbourhood. Other than being in the same area, there is little else common to the two tours. People often ask us which places we will show them on a tour, and we always struggle with our answer. Because even when we do pass by a significant landmark on our tours, chances are that our storyteller could be pointing in a very different direction, at a more mundane everyday sight.
You would expect that if you wanted to create the best tour, you needed to get the best guide. An expert, with impeccable credentials. So a historical tour needs a historian, a dance tour needs a dancer and so on. That is true but only in some cases, especially when the need is an academic one. Most of the times, that expertise is less important than what the expert chooses to present or how he/she chooses to present it. We owe much of our success to our team of storytellers. And they come with neither doctorates in history nor in storytelling. They are well read, smart and friendly people. Kudos to their top notch presentation skills and that they genuinely enjoy talking to an audience. Most importantly, they train hard and work to a script that takes a serious bit of effort to master. And thus by the time they are ready to host a trail, they truly are experts on the trail’s subject. But we don’t call them that, and they don’t like calling themselves that either. Our engagement with subject experts happens at the trail design level, when we work on our scripts.
June 2016 | CITY OBSERVER
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