THE KEEPER OF TIME
MMohammad Ikhlas Shaifi was born into a family of fourthgeneration watch traders, but his lifelong tryst with horology was a coincidence. Atfer finishing his schooling from St. Columba’s in Delhi, Shaifi found that he had missed out on the dates for admission to IIT Delhi. His father wrote a letter to the Swiss watchmaker Favre-Leuba, who they already had a long relationship with, asking them to help with getting young Ikhlas enrolled into a relevant technical course in Switzerland. He enrolled for a degree in micro engineering in the Technicum institute in Le Locle, a small town in the Jura Mountains that was home to reputed Swiss watchmakers Tissot, Zenith, Ulysse Nardin.
Favre-Leuba was grooming Ikhlas to run their factory in Hyderabad, which had been set in collaboration with French watchmaker Jaz to manufacture alarm clocks for the Indian market. He returned to India in 1975 after a six-month stint at the Jaz plant in France and began working in Hyderabad. But this lasted about a year, until the Indian government began issuing licences for smallscale watch-manufacturing units in India and his family decided to go into business for themselves.
The Packard Watch Co. was set up in Ghaziabad outside Delhi, which the family ran for 14 years. Their watches were pretty successful for a while, but eventually dealing with the stifling bureaucracy became too much and Ikhlas decided to return to repairing watches in Chandni Chowk’s Haveli Quli Haider that had been a Favre-Leuba office from when the building was first built.
“I don’t do it for the money, there isn’t much of that left in this work now. I get happiness from the smiles on the customers faces,” he says, referring to the steady stream of people who find their way up the steep and narrow flight of steps to his workshop in the hopes of getting their precious timepieces restored to their former glory. From derelict Cuckoo clock to long-forgotten pocket and wrist watches that are fourth- or fifthgeneration heirlooms, despondent owners seek him out after every other repair shop has failed them. Ikhlas takes them up as personal challenges, painstakingly gathering the intricate parts from his vast collection of spares. The numerous letters and emails from grateful customers all around the world are testament to the relevance of his skill, and a great source of pride to him.
The arrival of Quartz watches killed the watchmakers craft, Ikhlas feels. Robotics and computers made the watchmaker redundant. The complex web of intertwining mainspring, balance wheel, hairspring and a gear train have been replaced by electronic oscillators and quartz crystals, that are more accurate without having to be wound every day. But the magic has gone away. “Watches will live on with your iWatch and what not, but watchmakimg and repairing is dead,” he declares. ■
—Vikram Sharma