Ashok's Temple Tracker

Ashok takes forty relatives on temple trips, and the app keeps a big-text board of who has been where and who leads on total visits.

Who this is for

Ashok Deshmukh is seventy-one and lives in Nashik. Twice a year he organises a temple trip for his extended family, about forty people across four branches, from his elder sister who is seventy-eight to a grandnephew of nine. The moment is the dharamshala at nine in the evening, everyone tired, tea going round, and three cousins arguing about whether Bhimashankar counts for the ones who waited in the bus.

How the job is done today

Ashok keeps a green notebook. One page per trip, names down the left, temple names written sideways across the top, and a tick where the two meet. His handwriting has got bigger over the years and now only six names fit on a page, so a trip runs over four pages and he loses track of the fourth. There is also a WhatsApp group with all forty, but photos and forwards push everything up within an hour, so nobody scrolls back. At dinner the arguments are settled by whoever shouts with the most confidence, usually his younger brother, who is often wrong.

The screens, in order

1. The Board — Shows all forty names ranked by how many temples each person has visited, in text big enough to read from the other side of the room.
2. One Person — Tap a name and see that one person's own list of temples with the year beside each, so Ashok can settle a claim on the spot.
3. Finish a Temple — Marks a temple as done for the whole group in one tap, then lets Ashok remove the two or three who stayed back in the bus.
4. Add a Temple — Records a temple name and town so it can be marked off, including old ones being copied in from the notebook.
5. The Family — Holds the forty names so Ashok can add a new wife, a new grandchild, or someone who has stopped coming.

What it keeps track of

• Family members — name, which branch of the family, phone number if they have one, the first trip they came on, still coming or not
• Temples — temple name, town, which trip it belonged to, which day of the trip
• Visits — who, which temple, which day, and whether they went in or waited outside
• Trips — what the family calls it, the month and year, how many days, who came

The one decision that matters

The real choice is how a temple gets marked off. One way is to tick each person who went, forty taps at the end of every temple, on a screen where only six huge names fit at a time. The other way is to assume everyone went and remove the few who did not. Take the second. On a normal temple day thirty-seven of forty walk in, so Ashok makes three taps instead of forty, and he makes them while the three stragglers are standing in front of him arguing about it. The first way sounds more careful and would simply not get done by the fourth temple of the day.

What to leave out of the first version

Leave out photos entirely. A temple trip generates hundreds of them and they already have a WhatsApp group for that; putting them here means small thumbnails, waiting for them to load on a hill with one bar of signal, and a phone that fills up by the third day. Also leave out letting the other thirty-nine mark themselves. Half of them will not install anything, and the moment two people can record the same visit, Ashok stops trusting the board and goes back to the notebook.

How you would know it worked

At the guest house in Tirupati, Ashok's nephew takes the phone from him without asking and props it against the water jug so the cousins can see. Nobody opens the green notebook that evening. Someone notices they have slipped to eleventh and asks what time the morning temple leaves.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I am Ashok and every year I take about forty of my relatives on temple trips. Build me a phone app that keeps a board of who has visited which temple, with the names ranked by how many temples each person has done altogether. The text must be large enough that I can read it without my spectacles, and when I prop the phone up at the guest house in the evening the cousins sitting across the room should be able to read it too. When we finish a temple I want to tap the temple name once and have everyone counted as present, then remove only the two or three who stayed back in the bus. Let me copy in old trips from my diary going back several years, and let me tap any name to see that one person's own list of temples with the year next to each.