Vintage Indian watch movements — HMT, Allwyn, the era of mechanical time — embedded into paintings about what we chose to do with the hours we were given.
The Meridian is built around vintage Indian watch movements — HMT, Allwyn, the mechanical timepieces that measured the hours of a generation that built this country with their hands and their discipline.
Each movement is real. Each one carries a history. Each piece in this collection asks the same question differently: what did you do with the time you were given? And did you give the best of it to the people who deserved it most?
"It was never about the watch. It was about the man who wound it every morning — and what that winding taught without a single word spoken."
An HMT Janata. Wound every morning for thirty-one years by a man who never missed a day of work, never complained in front of his children, never let them see him doubt himself — even when he did. The watch was not expensive. It kept reasonable time. That was not the point.
The point was the winding. The daily, unhurried, deliberate act — of saying: today matters. Today I will show up. Today I will be the person my family believes I am. It is one of the most profound things a parent can give a child: not money, not advice, not even opportunity — but the daily evidence that discipline is possible, that courage is chosen, that love is demonstrated in the ordinary hours before anyone else woke up.
The painting shows the moment of passing. Not property. Not savings. Not anything a lawyer could draft. A father's hands giving what he actually owned — the belief that his child was capable of more than they knew. The courage to begin. The discipline to continue. The love that never needed to be said because it was shown every morning, without ceremony, for thirty-one years.
The watch is embedded at the centre. Still wound. Still running.
HMT Janata movement, 1970s production. Running. The watch that was wound every morning. Provenance documented.
"The watch stopped at 00:47 on December 3, 1984. The people of Bhopal did not."
An Allwyn watch recovered from Bhopal. Stopped at 00:47 — the hour the methyl isocyanate reached the streets. The watch stopped that night. The city did not. The people of Bhopal did not. They buried their dead, rebuilt their homes, raised their children, opened their shops, and refused — collectively, stubbornly, heroically — to be defined by the worst night in their history.
The painting does not show December 3, 1984. It shows Bhopal twenty years later — alive, loud, full of colour. Children playing in the streets where there was once silence. A chai stall where there was once darkness. A family on a rooftop at evening, the kind of ordinary joy that is the most defiant thing in the world when you know what that ground once held.
The watch — stopped at 00:47 — is embedded at the centre of this living, moving, breathing scene. A frozen moment inside an image of everything that kept going. The stopped hands surrounded by a world that refused to stop with them.
A portion of the proceeds from this piece goes to the Bhopal Medical Appeal.
Allwyn watch movement, recovered Bhopal, 1984. Stopped at 00:47, December 3. Chain of custody documented. Provenance verified.
"The Janata factory closed in 2016. Five decades of Indian mechanical watchmaking ended on a Tuesday afternoon. This movement is from the final run."
HMT's Janata watch was the watch of the Indian working class for five decades. Affordable, reliable, mechanical — it measured the hours of bus drivers and schoolteachers and factory foremen and farmers. When the Bangalore factory closed in 2016, it ended an era. Not just of watchmaking, but of the idea that India could make precision things with its own hands.
This piece is not a lament. It is a celebration of the fifty years before the closing — of what was built, what was made, what was worn on the wrists of a generation that built the country while wearing the country's own watch. The painting shows the factory floor not at the moment of closing, but at the height of its power: machines running, workers moving, the Janata coming off the line at the rate of thousands per day.
Where the machines stood in their final positions, 24K gold leaf. Not as mourning — as honour. This is what it looked like when India made time.
HMT Janata movement, final production run, Bangalore factory, 2016. One of the last movements made before the factory closed permanently.
"4.2 lakh kilometres. One driver. The same road, taken without complaint, every single day, for twenty-two years."
A dashboard clock removed from an Ambassador taxi on the day it completed 4,20,000 kilometres — removed by the driver himself, on his final day behind the wheel before retirement. He had kept the clock because it was the only thing in the car that told him how long he had been driving. Not the distance — the hours.
This is a piece about the dignity of consistent, unglamorous, extraordinary effort. 4.2 lakh kilometres is not a record anyone measures. It is not the kind of achievement that gets written about. It is the kind of achievement that happens when a man decides, every morning for twenty-two years, that he will show up, that he will drive carefully, that he will get his passengers home safely, and that the clock on the dashboard is the only audience he needs.
The painting shows an empty road at golden hour — the road after the last passenger has been dropped, the road that belongs to the driver alone for the last few minutes of the last day. The clock is embedded where the road meets the horizon. At the point where all that distance finally arrives somewhere.
Original dashboard clock, Ambassador taxi, removed by the driver on his retirement day after 4,20,000 kilometres. Provenance documented.
"Every morning before the house woke up. Forty-four years. Never skipped. Never explained."
An HMT pocket movement from the 1940s. Wound every single morning for forty-four years by the same man — a schoolteacher in a small town in Rajasthan who believed that precision was a form of respect. For time, for his students, for the subject he taught. He was never late to class in forty-four years. Not once.
He wound the watch because a wound watch is a promise: I will be where I said I would be, when I said I would be there. To wind a mechanical watch every morning is to recommit, daily, to the idea that time is not something that happens to you — it is something you participate in deliberately.
The painting is intimate — close, domestic, devotional. Two hands performing the act of winding in the early morning light before anyone else in the house has stirred. The watch at the centre of the frame, the crown between thumb and forefinger, the gesture that is both the most ordinary and the most profound thing a disciplined person does.
HMT pocket movement, 1940s production. Wound daily for 44 years. Provenance documented from the family of the original owner.
"Three thousand workers set their watches by this clock. For forty years, it was the most important time in the building."
The master clock movement from a textile mill in Ahmedabad that set the official time for 3,000 workers across four shifts for forty years. When this clock said it was 6:00 AM, it was 6:00 AM. Not the radio's 6:00 AM. Not the foreman's watch. This clock. This movement. The one at the centre of the factory, that every other clock in the building was set from.
There is something extraordinary about an object whose only purpose is to be correct — to be the thing that everything else is calibrated against. This is a piece about the people and organisations that hold the standard. That do not drift. That, when everything else is checked against them, are found to be right.
The painting shows the factory at the moment every shift changed — thousands of bodies moving in two directions simultaneously, the outgoing and the incoming, the end and the beginning, the master clock visible at the centre of the composition from which all of this movement radiates. Order from a single fixed point.
Master clock movement, Ahmedabad textile mill, operated 1958–1998. The clock that set time for 3,000 workers across four daily shifts for forty years.