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.
