My Father's HMT Pilot (Black Dial) ... C. 1973

There are two things I remember distinctly about this watch from my school days … this HMT Pilot that my father used to wear every day had a Velcro strap … and the hand and numbers would glow in the dark … and both were fascinating things for me … that ‘prrk prrk’ of the Velcro strap being removed provided a strange delight and we would wait every night after lights off to see the glowing hands and numbers … we used to call it the ‘radium’ watch … 

This Pilot is like a family watch for all three brothers …  we have grown up seeing this watch on our father’s wrist … I don’t remember seeing any other watch … I asked him when he had bought it … he was not so sure of the year, but said it is easily 40 years old … he had purchased it when he was a clerk in the bank where he worked all his life till his retirement … then (even now) Pilot was a coveted watch and was not available easily and freely and one had to book in advance and all that … so, father asked his eldest brother (now late, who lived in Bangalore, sort of home of HMT) to get a Pilot for him and he in turn had asked a friend of his who worked in HMT Bangalore to manage a piece for him … and that’s how this Pilot came to live in our house forty years ago … he must have purchased it around 5 years after I was born … 1973 or thereabouts … and he paid Rs.90/- for it …

Then, when I started getting interested in HMT watches a few years back, I wondered  what happened to father's Pilot … he no longer wore it … he wears an HMT Surya now (my mother’s name … HMT made some of these older generation chaps fling discretion out of the window!!!  Just check some wrists discreetly!!!) … anyway, before I lose direction over discretion, let me get back to this depiction (trying too hard, eh Jai?) … then when I went to Bangalore a couple of years back, I came to know that my youngest brother (a passionate watchman, he even had a separate drawer made in his new flat for his watches!) had retrieved father’s Pilot and my grandfather’s Kiran from our home in Shimoga and had them serviced and strapped (he he…) … and he graciously gave both watches to me … I hope he doesn’t regret that decision now … and that’s how I got hold of father’s Pilot …

And quite recently, I looked up on the Internet and discovered that this Pilot belongs to one of the earliest batches that were manufactured … I got to know that Pilots of that vintage had ‘Water Protected’ on the dial along with ‘Para Shock’ and ’17 Jewels’ … and on the back cover, ‘Water Dust Protected’ & ‘Shock Proof’ … later Pilots no longer had ‘Water Protected’ on the dial, and on the back cover ‘Shock Resistant’ instead of ‘Shock Proof’ and ‘Water Dust Protected’ is done away with … I don’t have a later (or recent) Pilot to compare with, so I think I will hold on and check with my friend Hari, and if he chips in with his inputs, nothing like that … (I am trying to locate a recent Pilot, and efforts are still on … anybody out there … ???)

 The vint-age shows on the watch … the hands and numbers no longer glow at night … but like a true blue HMT mechanical watch, it tick tocks along merrily when keyed up … and I miss that prrk prrk of the Velcro strap …  

Two Sri Lankan Writers and their recent Novels … Romesh Gunesekara’s Noontide Toll and The Prisoner of Paradise and Shyam Selvadurai’s The Hungry’ Ghosts …

I had read Romesh Gunesekera’s first novel Reef sometime back in 1994 or 1995 … I was working for my MPhil at CIEFL then … a fellow student, Krishna Priya (KP), had Reef with her one day during evening tea at the mess and I asked her about the novel … she said she had chosen Reef to work on her diploma dissertation … we were working with the same research supervisor and so there was this common connection … I asked her if she could lend me the novel … I read the novel and was mesmerized … the descriptions, the lyrical prose, the languid pace, the sea, the house fascinated me … and the story itself was narrated so beautifully that a certain kind of wistfulness remained long after you closed the book … it was a slim novel and I could finish it in quick time, but the novel stayed with me and when I could afford to, I bought a copy for myself … and I have read it many times over since …

After that I was on the lookout for novels by Romesh Gunesekera … Reef  had come out in 1994 … he had written a book of short stories called Monkfish Moon earlier … then came Sandglass in 1998 and I read it eagerly … it was good but did not come even close to Reef … Heaven’s Edge (2002) was superb and made me read it more than once … the next, The Match (2006) was different, though it dealt with issues which are dear to Gunesekera … and for a long time (6 years), Gunesekera sort of disappeared and then in 2012, I saw that he had come with a novel called The Prisoner of Paradise … for some reason, I postponed my purchase of this novel … and then, some months back I saw that there was another new novel by Gunesekera, Noontide Toll (2013) … now I had two Gunesekera novels to look forward to …

Around the same time that I read Gunesekera’s Reef, I also noticed another Sri Lankan writer, Shyam Selvadurai … the interesting thing was, as it is obvious by their names, while Gunesekera was Sinhala, Selvadurai was of mixed Tamil-Sinhala parentage … Selvadurai had written a novel Funny Boy (1994) which was released around the same time as Reef … again, interestingly, they have followed a similar trajectory in terms of book releases … each had a book releasing in the same year, more or less … though Gunesekara has written two novels more than Selvadurai … Selvadurai went on to write Cinnamon Gardens (1998) and Swimming in the Monsoon Sea (2005) …  in 2013, Selvadurai’s Hungry Ghosts was released … and along with two Gunesekera novels, I had Hungry Ghosts too to look forward to …

Both write about love and longing and of people caught between the ethnic and political tensions in Sri Lanka … while Guesekera’s novels are peopled with Sinhalas, Selvadurai’s novels have more Tamils coming in … Selvadurai has a decidedly gay angle in his novels, but what I found most fascinating was a very high degree of empathy and understanding gay relationships evoked in other people in Selvadurai’s novels … not just tolerance, which is restrictive in many ways …

And so, I have been following their literary trajectories and reading their novels as and when they came out … and now I had three novels to buy and read and being the kind of the person I am, I wanted to buy all three together … Amazon offered me the best bargain and I bought all three in July this year to coincide with my birthday … a sort of self-gift(s) 

I read Gunesekera’s Noontide Toll first … it was the slimmest and I wanted to get into the system first and then tackle the big ones … and I am glad I read Noontide Toll first … the novel offered me a completely different kind of narrative compared to other Gunesekara novels … the novel is a like a strand of different kinds of gems held together by a common string … or rather like a set of short stories held together by a common narrator … interlinked short stories? and ingeniously, the narrator here is Vasantha, a van driver, who ferries people across the land that is Sri Lanka … his passengers are businessmen, families searching for roots, charity workers, and each has a story … as he moves from army camps to beaches, from the north to the south, meeting different kinds of people, we get a picture of Sri Lanka after the end of the ‘conflict’ … the listener and narrator, Vasantha, adds his own wry and witty comments to the stories of his passengers and many comments come across as wise sayings … go read it, you won’t be disappointed …

I wanted to read Selvadurai after reading Gunesekara … Selvadurai’s The Hungry Ghosts moves between Canada and Sri Lanka and it has certain autobiographical elements … you have the parallels in the novel and Selvadurai’s life … boy of mixed Tamil-Sinhala parentage, the move to Canada during the early years of the conflict, coming to terms with his gayness … and then there is the maternal grandmother, a Sinhala, who wants to ‘make’ her half-Tamil grandson into a proper ‘Sinhala’ and her attempts in this direction, her conflicts with her daughter, the life of Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants in Canada, love and loss, and death … and coming to grips with all this is Shivan Rassaiah as he searches for redemption … Selvadurai evocatively brings out the contrasts, colours, life, sights, smells, of life in Sri Lanka and Canada … it took some time for me to finish The Hungry Ghosts, but it was worth it at the end …

After reading these two novels, I went back to Gunesekera and started The Prisoner of Paradise … from reading the early pages I saw that the novel is set in the past, in Mauritius, in 1825, during the ‘glory days’ of colonial British rule in Mauritius … so, the scale of this novel is decidedly different from Gunesekera’s earlier novels and I could also say, has ‘epic’ ambitions … I have read about 25 pages or so … and I think I am going to enjoy reading it, once I restart … 

My SSLC gift ... HMT Vijay ... 30 years ago ...

Ever since news broke out that HMT Watches is shutting shop, there has been a slew of articles in major newsmagazines about HMT watches…nostalgic articles about how HMT was the one and only watch that was available and how people placed orders for specific models months before and how sturdy these watches were and how they have lasted decades without repair and how the time-tested hand-winding mechanism gave away to the more glamourous Titan quartz watches…and so on and so forth and there was also lament that things could have been better if the whole enterprise was managed well…

And of course, on the Internet, there are pages and pages of pictures of people displaying their HMT watches, their first watch, their wedding watch, their graduation watch and so on…suddenly there is a lot of interest and people are queueing up to grab whatever they can and HMT have almost tripled their prices…

And it looks like most people in India in their late 30s and above have their own HMT watch story…and here is mine…

As was the custom in many South Indian families, I got my first watch when I was in the 10^th class…the reason, I think, was that you wrote a ‘public exam’ when in 10^th class and that students needed to manage their time and needed a watch…I too got one, but how well I managed my time and whether I passed out with flying colours is a question that is moot…maybe I just ‘passed out’…

On the 1^st of January 1983, I got my HMT Vijay black dial mechanical hand-winding watch…my father got it for me…I was studying in Milagres High School in Mangalore at that time…this was the only watch I had till almost 1998 and used it every day… sometimes I wore it while I nodded off and saw the watch ticking away merrily in the morning…for 15 years me and my Vijay were inseparable, and then my brother gifted me a Titan watch and I used to wear these two watches alternately…and slowly, Vijay went into its box and I got another Titan as a wedding gift…and the earlier Titan went into its box…

Some five years back, my youngest brother, who is a watch fanatic, and I were talking watches…I had been to a Titan showroom and seen some automatic watches and told him about the various models and how expensive they were and all that…he told me that HMT has a blue dial & blue strap automatic model which is very good, and not expensive at all for an automatic watch…and this opened up my second and continuing affair with HMT watches…and prompted me to take out my first HMT watch, Vijay, from its box…I wound it up and it started tick-tocking like a dream and keeps time smoothly …

And here I would like to show some pictures of my iconic HMT Vijay NL hand-winding mechanical watch, which is now 31 years old … and still running strong… I wear it occasionally now, now that it has become an antique and is very precioussss...

Yeah, this is how Vijay NL looks...simple...and sturdy...many of my classmates were sons of fathers working in the "Gulf" in high paying jobs, and they had Casio and Ricoh watches, and I used to look longingly at those watches...now I am glad I got this watch...

A close-up of the face...taken without flash...

Another close-up...this time with flash...

The back...the serial number printed at the back tells the manufacturing unit where the watch was made and also the year of manufacture, so some HMT watch enthusiasts say... 

Haan...can you see that pin?  he he...I don't know what that is called, but that link came out and I didn't have the patience to get another one fixed or maybe when that happened I didn't have money or something...anyway, I put a pin into that slot and bent it upwards...this must have happened twenty years ago, I don't remember exactly, but the pin has stayed on...

Three decades of scratches...if only random lines could speak...!!!  

This is the front and back of the 'Certificate of Guarantee' book ... 

This is the 'Certificate of Guarantee...'  see the date?  1 - 1 - 83 

The receipt ... watch purchased at Vaman Nayak Sons, Mangalore ... for a princely sum of Rs. 258 ... that's my father's name there on top ... he paid for it!!