In the Belly of Time

Watches are themselves fascinating. Like old masterpieces one can look at them for any length of time. I suppose you do have to maintain such info, but how about giving us a bit more on the price and the auction money being spent on this kinda buying?

Please continue with it. By any chance you are not into old pens, are you? :)

"Who says diamonds are women's best friends. This breed of woman is rare and demands respect, head strong and intensely intellectual femme. Once a girl held an indepth discussion on mechanical time pieces and I almost lost the balance."

Loved these lines! You are not just a watch-seller but a great writer too.
Well I love old classic pendulum clocks- as huge as big size cupboards and as tiny as pocket-watches. But ‘inside mechanism’ of these always fascinates me.

“One doesn't have to be rich to admire time pieces, its like being to Louvre and basking in Vinci's Mona Lisa, without taking her home. Or being to Vatican and lose reasoning with Michelangelo's "CREATION”.”

Exactly! Totally agree.
It is undoubtedly a very informative, arty and interesting essay.


Nikhat Riaz

We can start from the days of Pocket watches. Those days the automatic and quartz movements didn't existed. Men/Women both had to wind their pocket watches daily.

Now every thing in our lives is determined by gravity. And due to gravity pull the watches either gained or lose time. (Till date there is none accurate watch, except the quartz/battery operated. ) Then came a man" Breguet", father of modern watchmaking who invented Tourbillon, patented in 1801. A french term for 'whirlwind', the tourbillon is an escapement which compensates any time loss loss to gravitational pull, but doesn't elimenates completely.

Tourbillon was originally meant for pocket watches, now most high end watch manufacturors boast of having tourbillon. Well tourbillon is facinating to look at, a good tourbillon will have around 70 parts and over all weight not exceeding .75 grams. That is less than 1 gram. Developed by the senior watch maker over a duration of time. That's why at times a watch with tourbillon costs more than a Rolls Royce.

Now days very few people wear a pocket watch. So there are wrist watches, which initially were worn by women and later soldier in WW1 made it famous, so all men endorsed the wrist watches.


In mechanical watches there are manual winding and automatic ones. There are many complications like , chrono graph, perpetual calendar, minute repeater, split second chrono. Etc. Then there are watches known as 'Grand Complications', which house few complications, these watches are very hard to construct and very expensive.

Lately the auction market for timepieces have picked up, with old Patek's going for record prices.

this is an unusual article on CHOWK..and I am glad that it was published. We need more off-beat and informative, FIRST HAND, write-ups like these rather than the intellectuali-tis infested , "Educated" types of crap that gets regurgirated and vomitted out here.

Your article would have appealed even more to me if you had explained the mechanisms e.g which enable these watches to self-wind or how gravity is defied or how or where these delicate parts are perfected. More information about the owners & manufacturers(?) & their family saga would definitely make an interesting reading.

Please reply and continue upon the above theme..whatever you know.