The Tick Tick days

Dear Friends, I wish you all a blessed and holy season of prayers, as we Indians celebrate a special day of prayer and look towards God blessings upon our days.

WHEN was the last time you sat by the surf and listened to the sound of your passions?  We hear so many sounds all around and fail to have our hearts fixed to them. Today I want to tell you of one small jingle I listen to too often and to which I am fixed.  It is the story of my passion for mechanical wristwatches and mechanical clock moments. Like my thoughts on time, I often have the heart to think of time makers: the wristwatches.

As I grew up, I always nurtured a passion for watches. I would look carefully at anyone who had a big watch or a relatively small watch. In the evenings, when my Dad comes home, he would take off his fat watch and place it on the study. And I would climb the chair and slowly roll my eye around his watch. Those kindergarten days never told me anything about watches… it took some time for me to know that it was a Rolex chronometer. Mom’s rectangular gold colour thin watch was always kept in her locker. I seldom noticed it. But I did understand that it was one thing she treasured much.  It was a West End Swiss.

My first watch was a hmt ‘Vijay’. I loved it as I would love my first real bicycle. Times ticked by and soon I saw a watch whose second hand would jump in a pulsating manner, instead of smooth and flowing small steps. They called it ‘Quartz’, … and some of the boys whose dads were expatriates were owning those new watches. It took more years for me to own one of those ‘quartz’ movements myself. They never impressed me anything more than the laziness which is instilled in giving up the routine of winding a watch or listening to the moving world inside a watch.

More years have ticked by. And in these moments my collection of chronometers have also improved and I have gathered a handful of chronometer-friends too.  We make interesting one-to-one contacts often.  Not all of them are mechanical diehards as I am. But we listen to each other and enjoy our ticking passion.

Mechanical movements are at the heart of a watch. I am an enthusiast of only the mechanical. One of my friends always proselytizes me about those electric battery-powered watches. Somehow, his words don’t get into my veins.  “Why?” he asked me last week. “ Isn’t it romantic and so real to power our time from within ourselves?” My time is only mine: my most personal, most valuable and most intangible of all worldly assets.  How can I make a battery cell charge those precious moments? And why should I take another share in polluting the world with poisonous metal concentrates from those tiny batteries?  “Clean time” I would call it, like “clean mobility” I call my bicycles.

The Basel Fair is the watchmakers’  Olympics and the world of chronometer fans. In the 1986 Basel Fair, one Japanese company unveiled a prototype watch that would become  “a powerhouse of technological innovation”. They called it “kinetic”.  We cannot call the kinetic an electric watch because the prime energy is mechanical and only the secondary energy is electrical. Wearing a kinetic is like holding a new time upon your hand.

How fast time keeps ticking! Today, we don’t wear a watch or listen to it its tiny tick for the sheer purpose of knowing the time, but it is something of a jewel, something as close and persona as our wedding ring… something which tells about our lifestyle and our ethos. I still have a burning passion for probing the best of the chronometer world… and a childlike inquisitiveness to hear tick-tick stores go on and on.

I am sharing the video of a passionate young Jap watchmaker. If there is one word in English to describe his passion, then it is “INCREDIBLE”! ... (https://youtu.be/ZTiPNqeMS8E)

May the God of Time bless us evermore …

P. S : HMT India has re-stared the manufacture of mechanical and other select models of their watches. That is a good news.

A very own journey…

     “That is why it is so important to let certain things go. To release them. To cut loose. Don't expect to get anything back, don't expect recognition for your efforts, don't expect your genius to be discovered or your love to be understood. Complete the circle. Not out of pride, inability or arrogance, but simply because whatever it is no longer fits in your life. Close the door, change the record, clean the house, get rid of the dust. Stop being who you were and become who you are!”  Paulo Coelho

Becoming  Who I am is a lifelong mission. The world looks at an individual in different eyes. But do we have to look at the world in what makes us unique?  Becoming Who I am will look like a lot of rubbish in the eyes of the world if I fail to make money and name… because that’s what defines an individual in today’s social circle. One observation I make of people is their affiliation to clubs, their affiliations to people’s groups and even social movements which flatten out their unique individuality most.

There are times when we got to build our dreams all by our own hands,… by our imagination and by our strength… it may involve relocation, reformatting or a re-new-ing of our beliefs and value systems. We might have to do it simply because “it no longer fits” into our present days or our today’s journey.  A little deep voice within us that constantly echoes our passion and vision will tell us of our vocation here on earth. I love to listen to that voice constantly.

The first time I read the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, it echoed in me an invitation to lead a stoic attitude towards many of today’s social beliefs. “If” left in me a very deep challenge. I got it written on a wooden board and hung it on a visible wall at home. I like that poem in reference to the strong voice of aloofness and individuality. “Come what may… keep going my son”, Kipling tells his boy. The main message is not to get caught in emotions and be carried away by the contemporary flow of the world.

Someone said, “It takes courage to answer a call”. True, it takes a lot of courage to make up our journey, our very own journey and pedal with it all the while.

If we can live a life not to convince anyone and not to be in an ego trap, …. if we can fail to fall victim of a social belief or to a world that looks to overtake us… then we can pedal our wheels of freedom, to pedal aiming the golden sunset of our journey called life.

Still, it takes courage to be what we are.

Keep going ... 

 

The Old Rugged Cross...

The year 2008. At the US Consulate in Chennai, I was standing in a long line at for VISA clearance. Behind me was a cassock robed elderly priest. From the cassock he wore,  I guessed he was from Catholic denomination. After making a few eye contacts, I accosted him in a conversation, “Father, are you for a VISA clearance to US?” … “ Yes, going on a parish mission.” “Me too”, I said. Then  I sprang up more courage to continue the conversation, and chipped in, “ Father, do you think we deserve all this?  That old rugged empty cross made our journey possible, isn’t it ?”  He smiled having no words to answer.

First Methodist Episcopal Church of Pokagon where
The Old Rugged Cross was first sung.
This church finds a place in
the National Register of Historic Places of USA

The year 1913… a small church in Pokagon was arranging a series of revival meetings. The Pastor was Rev. Leroy Bostwick, and he had called his friend Rev.Bennard to assist him in singing. Bennard was a gospel singer and an evangelist. A couple of weeks before assisting Rev. Leroy, he was singing a verse and chorus he had written,  in a small revival meeting at Michigan.  Bennard was ridiculed over that song by a group of youths who attended the prayer meeting.  But, traveling to Pokagon to assist Bostwick, Bennard did not quit on those verses he had scribbled. He studied more about the Cross and its significance.

At Pokagon, the revival meeting was in progress. And Bennard was working on the verse he had sung at Michigan. He sought the assistance of Rev. Leroy’s wife, Ruby, to be a sounding board for redoing his song. As the days progressed, at the church parsonage, he added more verses and composed the music… and he was readily strumming his guitar for a rehearsal. As Bennard ended his first rehearsal, it is said that Ruby was weeping aloud on her knees, in the presence of her husband Rev.Leroy.  Later that day, on 12^th January 1913 (the last day of the revival meeting), a gospel song was born which would influence every Christian who would ever listen to it. That song went on for 100 years and more to be performed by some of the twentieth century's most important recording artists in the West.

 

Each time I hear the ‘The Old Rugged Cross’, it shatters ALL my sense (myth) of self-righteousness. Where am I? What am I?  How am I? … these questions which reverberate in me will all end, I know, only when “my trophies, at last, I lay down …  (and when) I will cling to the old rugged Cross … And exchange it someday for a crown .”

"The Old Rugged Cross" to me is the one the great eloquence of Christian faith at all ages.

~Fine~