Wear a wristwatch, because it’s a badass thing to do
I wrote a lament in this column regarding a number of excellent watch brands not being available in India. Amongst these, I counted such great favourites of watch enthusiasts like Tudor and Hamilton. I’d also mentioned some other such bugbears, like the lack of fantastic quartz Timex timepieces such as the Q chronograph and the Q GMT, as well as the mechanical Timex Marlin.
One of my criticisms of this dearth had to do with finding value. Good watches do not come cheap, especially when they are mechanical watches with either manually wound or automatic movements. The cheapest ‘good’ watch comes in roughly the ₹20,000-40,000 bracket.
This is a band dominated by the two Japanese heavyweights: Seiko and Citizen. For Swiss watches, that band begins somewhere closer to ₹70,000, and there is no upper ceiling to the prices of those manufactures. If you are able to shell out over ₹10 lakh for a luxury timepiece, in India, you can.
But spending such amounts of money, even if you can, hardly constitutes commensurate value for every rupee spent. A mechanical watch is a mechanical watch, and at higher prices, you will be getting more accurate and luxuriously finished movements, alongside more luxurious materials like yellow or white gold. But does that really constitute value, especially if you also count the price of maintaining such a watch? This dilemma is true for watch enthusiasts everywhere, even in more wealthy markets like the US and Europe.
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