THE HOURS FLY BY
A NEW COLLECTION OF WATCHES REFERENCES AN ICON OF INDIA’S AVIATION GLORY
Once referred to as the “combat backbone of the air force”, the MiG-21 Type 77 fighter jet was retired in 2013. Introduced in 1963, it had, for 50 years, served the nation well. With the capacity to travel at 1,350 km per hour, the jet, in effect, had won us the 1971 war against Pakistan. The Bangalore Watch Company, a newborn fine watch brand, has recently brought out a collection, ‘MACH 1’, of five watches dedicated to India’s first supersonic fighter.
“Aviation is a common theme where watch brands draw inspiration from to tell stories of their history, culture, countries. We realised nobody in India is doing that,” says co-founder Nirupesh Joshi, who runs The Bangalore Watch Company with his wife Mercy Amalraj. The dial of the mechanical automatic watches takes inspiration from the cockpit instrumentation—all in black and white with a red tip on the seconds’ hand. The tapering crown echoes the afterburner nozzle of the Mig-21 Type 77. One model in the collection also has actual material in the dial recovered from a decommissioned AIF MiG-21 Type 77. Because the recovered skin (or metal) was so small in quantity, only 21 pieces were successfully produced.
The Bangalore Watch Company has released only a few hundred pieces of its MACH 1 collection, and prices range between Rs 48,000 and Rs 53,000. “We invest so much in iPhones but not in high quality timekeeping instruments. I hope to change that. Watches last 25 years, an iPhone only one,” says Joshi.