5 august 2019 http://www.openthemagazine.com 45T
hey meet as often as
they can, swilling single
malts and admiring
their latest acquisitions,
the movements of a
complex series of gears
and springs, the variation of the tiny hand
measuring the passage of seconds, the
pattern of the self-winding pendulum or
the manually wound mainspring, or just
contemplating the next object of their at-
tention. they are grown men, with busi-
nesses, wives and children, but when it
comes to their pricey baubles, they can be
rendered quite childlike.
“It’s what keeps us sane,” says aman
Kathuria, whose day job is running his
family’s stainless-steel manufacturing busi-
ness but whose lifetime passion is watches,
shared by 45 other members of a collectors’
club called J9. the purchase of a watch has
marked every special occasion in Kathu-
ria’s life, beginning with the art Deco-in-
fluenced tissot Classic Prince, a homage to
its 1917 version, when he graduated from
Delhi’s sri Venkateswara College to his lat-
est purchase—a quirky piece, with a green
dial and a bronze case, an Oris 40mm Big
Crown Pointer Date designed to celebrate
the 80th anniversary of a special piece cre-
ated in 1938 so that glove-wearing second
World War airmen could easily adjust it.
Kathuria is the kind of man Pranav
saboo can relate to. saboo is CeO, ethos
Watch Boutiques, India’s largest chain of
luxury watch boutiques with 45 stores
across India, and ethoswatches.com, the
country’s largest website for watches,
which sells watches in the range of Rs
10,000 to Rs 2 crore. the Chandigarh-based
saboo has every plan to make both even
more exclusive when he launches the first
boutique in the country to sell watches
from global independent watchmakers
to discerning Indians. the prices will be
higher but he hopes it will be worth it for
those looking for distinctive work, as the
world’s watch-making axis shifts from
Geneva in switzerland to Glashütte in Ger-
many, home of the handmade Nomos and
a Lange & söhne. Both brands embody
the transformations in global politics. as
Gary shteyngart wrote in The New Yorker
in 2017, in ‘Confessions of a Watch Geek’,Nomos specialises in manual-winding
and automatic mechanical watches and
was founded in January 1990 by Roland
schwertner, two months after the fall of
the Berlin Wall. a Lange & söhne was
founded in 1845 by Ferdinand adolph
Lange, the godfather of German watch-
making. after the second World War, the
soviets nationalised the company based
in the former east Germany. Walter Lange,
the great-grandson of Ferdinand, fled to the
West. In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, when Lange was sixty-six years old,
he returned to Glashütte and started mak-
ing watches again.
It is these brands, worshipped in stores
such as Contrapante in New york, that
saboo wants to bring to India. these
brands, which still venerate craftsman-
ship, are quite content making just 500
to 3,000 watches a year. It’s their stories he
finds fascinating, often traversing warsand revolutions. Brands, such as h moser,
was founded by independent watchmaker
heinrich moser in st Petersburg, Russia in
1828, makers of pocket watches favoured
by Vladimir Lenin. saboo plans an atelier
for 10 such brands under the ethos um-
brella at Chanakyapuri in Delhi by august.
“they are unique in that they are a work of
art and a work of wearability,” says saboo.
Luxury watches work on the principle
of exclusivity, given that they are a perfect
blend of art and engineering, but they have
an additional quality that reflects the val-
ues of the buyer. In this rarefied world,
there is, however, a gold standard—the
Rolex, whose resale value is usually dou-
ble its cost. Founded in London in 1905 by
hans Wilsdorf as a company specialising
in the distribution of timepieces, he startedto dream of wristwatches equipped with
mechanical movements manufactured
by a swiss watch-making company in
Bienne. When a London secretary named
mercedes Gleitze swam across the english
Channel in 1927, Wilsdorf made sure she
had a Rolex Oyster on her wrist. Rolex has
kept its association with adventure by ac-
companying explorers from mountain-
tops to the depths of oceans. ever since,
the story of the watch has been of extraor-
dinary achievement.
as Kathuria says, they don’t choose
their brand ambassadors unthinkingly.
“Who wouldn’t want to emulate a Roger
Federer or a Jack Nicklaus?” and our very
own Vijay amritraj? Indeed, in these so-
cial media-savvy times, the more-than-
hundred-year-old brand has the coolest
hashtag possible: #everyRolextellsastory.
What’s more, the classic swiss watch has
always restricted its manufacture, ensur-ing demand is always higher than supply.
saboo currently finds himself torn be-
tween his two loves, his perpetual obses-
sion, the Rolex Daytona, of which a mere
30 pieces are manufactured every year, and
which has a waiting list of 1,000, much like
the Birkin handbag for women, and the
Parmigiani Kalpagraphe Chronomètre.
“It’s a technical marvel with its integrated
chronograph but it is also beautiful with
its rose-gold case. I wear it with an alliga-
tor leather strap,” he says about the latter.
But are luxury watches an exclusively
male preserve? Do men collect watches the
way women collect handbags, with the in-
built advantage that their acquisitions are
timeless? For anita Khatri, whose mum-
bai-based company represents Ulysse
Nardin, which has been in the business of5 august 2019at a cost of over
rs 2.5 lakh a watch,
gaurav mehta has
been giving options,
such as engraving
lord hanuman
inside the watch