A Casio on my father's wrist.
The first watch I remember was on my dad's wrist. It was a Casio, a slim steel digital like the A158W. Casio first made that watch in 1989, the year I was born. It wasn't gold and it wasn't Swiss, and it didn't need to be. It was simply part of him, as familiar as his voice.
You can still buy that same Casio today for about thirty-four dollars. I like that. Every watch I have loved since, from a Moonwatch to a tiger from 1947, goes back to that one.
The only watch that passed NASA’s tests. The one that went to the Moon.
The watch NASA trusted, and the one that went to the Moon.
Omega launched the Speedmaster in 1957 as a racing chronograph. In 1965 NASA put it through heat, shock, vacuum and humidity tests, and it was the only watch to pass. On 21 July 1969 Buzz Aldrin wore one on the Moon.
Apollo 11 landed twenty years before I was born. I know that day only through photographs and old film. What stays with me is how much of it rested on people and on simple tools they could trust. A watch was one of those tools.
NASA tested the Speedmaster hard, and it kept running. It needed no battery and no signal. When Apollo 13 lost power, three men timed a fourteen-second burn on a hand-wound chronograph and made it home. That still moves me.
The Moonwatch has no rotor. It is wound by hand, a few turns of the crown each morning, and then it runs for about two days. I admire that ritual. It asks for a moment of attention, and in return it keeps faith with you.
१९४७
Baagh means tiger in Hindi. Jaipur Watch Company builds each Baagh around a real 1947 coin from the last year of British India, with its walking tiger set into the dial.
For me, 1947 is not just a date. It is an emotion. It is the year India became free, and a Baagh puts a coin from that very year on my wrist. I chose Devanagari numerals. Reading the hours in that script makes the watch feel like it belongs to India, and to me.
For me, 1947 is not just a date. It is an emotion.
At the centre of the dial sits a real one-rupee coin from 1947, the year India won its freedom from British rule. It was among the last coins struck before independence, and on its face a tiger is walking.
I like to think about where that coin has been. It passed from hand to hand in a country about to become free. Nobody spending it could have known it would end up keeping time. Each time I check the hour, I am looking at a small piece of 1947.
Numerals are easy to overlook. On most watches they are Arabic or Roman, and nobody thinks twice. A Baagh can be had with Devanagari, the script of Hindi and Sanskrit. That is the one I chose.
The coin already speaks that language. Its face value is written in English, Hindi and Urdu. Devanagari hours around it make the whole dial feel of one piece. Jaipur Watch Company was founded in Jaipur in 2013 by Gaurav Mehta, in a city that has cared about time for almost three hundred years.
Baagh simply means tiger. The tiger is India's national animal, and the one on the coin is a Bengal tiger in mid-stride. The head is low, one paw is reaching forward and the tail curves up behind. It looks patient and certain at the same time.
Jaipur Watch Company has kept that tiger at the heart of the Baagh line since 2022. To me it is a quiet reminder to keep moving, steadily, the way that tiger does.
A dial made of snow, and a seconds hand that never ticks.
The dial is not painted white. Grand Seiko silver-plates it into a texture taken from the snow on the Hotaka mountains in Shinshu, where the winter wind carves patterns into the surface. In changing light it looks less like a dial and more like a field after a storm.
Then there is the seconds hand. Spring Drive is a mainspring movement governed by a quartz-regulated glide wheel, so the blued hand does not step. It flows around the dial in one unbroken motion, the way time actually passes.
I admire how quiet it is. A light titanium case, a plain white dial, no drama. All of the work is in the details you only notice once you look closely.
I'm an engineer by trade. I collect watches to wear them, and this journal is where I keep their stories.