Chasing Time Volume 1: The Hunt

Man has long had a passion for the hunt, his earliest encounters were to satiate his appetite for meat, it soon moved towards more carnal desires and he began his approach towards the fairer sex. As man evolved so did his expeditions, from the hunt for new civilisations to the search for meaning in our stars. From the wise who chase memories to the less judicious who lust for gold. As a man, I am both driven and enamoured by the hunt, and like those before me I am obsessive in chasing my vice. I run in desperation after time.

My fascination with time, and subsequently the measures of time, began at a relatively impressionable age of 12 or perhaps 14. There were two concepts that intrigued me then, and continue to hypnotise me today. The first was understanding a person’s relation to time; how it is created, savoured, and consumed. The second was with the devices that equated the infinitum of time. And so began my journey into the haunting pursuit of the perfect keeper of time, the perfect wristwatch.

My journey had humble beginnings, and like most, it started at home. I vividly remember my father bringing back an oblong gift in a plastic box from one of his business travels to Europe. The intermittent translucency of the packaging was magical and so revolutionary to me. It was like nothing that he had gotten for me in the past. It was my first tryst with beauty, besides a girl across the wall in my gender-segregated Catholic school who now remains faceless.

The contents of the box however had a face that I would find hard to forget. It was called Swatch and its model was the Flik Flak. This was a definitive moment in my road to becoming a man, because now, like all the adults, I had time on my hands. Flik would dutifully show me the minutes while his sister Flak would reveal the hours. Telling the time would be a wonderful task and I was happy to arbitrarily let others around me know what minutes of the hour had been struck. A secret friendship was formed, as the wristwatch would accompany me through my many highs, lows, and troughs in life.

Many decades later I would purchase a Flik Flak for my daughter from a trip abroad, in the hope that she would form a meaningful secret friendship of her own. As for me, my seemingly mature self is looking for that one perfect watch that will remain on my wrist for as long as my wrist remains with me. The problem is that the perfect watch may be as much a reality as Atlantis.

Read Volume 2, here.

Vikram Ramchandani is father to a beautiful girl and husband to an even more beautiful girl. Canadian but really Indian. Left university and home at 21 and became an investment banker for many unhappy people and is now an entrepreneur who employs many happy people. Is full katti with the current education system for mutating children into adults.