More HMT !

 

Who are HMT?

HMT stands for Hindustan Machine Tools. The company is owned by the Government of India. HMT was entrusted with the vital task of building machine tools for the newly independent India and in 1953 the first machine tool factory was set up at Bangalore.

Then Prime Minister of India Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru believed that India was capable of manufacturing precision components and he allowed HMT to set up a watch factory at Bangalore in collaboration with M/s Citizen Watch Co., Japan in 1961. In July of 1961, one hundred employees of HMT Watches went to the Citizen factory in Tokyo and learned every aspect of manufacturing watches for one year. Upon their return, employees of Citizen Watch Company spent a year in India assisting with the setup of manufacturing. Production of watches began in 1962, with first batch released by then Prime Minister Nehru.

Then Prime Minister of India Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru releasing the first batch of hand wound wrist watches.

Headquartered in Bangalore, the 60-year-old HMT — for several decades the celebrated timekeeper of India, and a powerful home-grown manufacturer of capital goods — was severely hit by the new policy and business regime post-1991. In 2000, HMT was broken into five subsidiary companies, HMT Ltd. (which controls the Pinjore tractor plant), HMT Machine Tools, HMT Watches Ltd., HMT Chinar Ltd., HMT Bearings and HMT (International) Ltd. This was primarily done to give autonomy to the subsidiaries and to leverage the company’s experience and skills through product diversification.

Since when are they making Watches?

HMT began manufacturing mechanical movements under license from Citizen. At its peak, HMT manufactured watches in three factories and had a specialized watch case division in Bangalore. HMT has produced over 110 million watches since the 1960s; it expanded its production facilities with two additional factories, one in Tumkur, near Bangalore, and another in Ranibagh in Northern India.

Some of the most popular models like Janata, Sona, and Pilot are powered by hand-wound Caliber HMT 020, now rebranded as HMT 0231. 020 was the older HMT designation for the basic handwind movement when the movement tooling setup at Watch Factory-1 (Bangalore) was being used. Around 1985 the 020 was being manufactured with new tooling at Ranibagh in northern India and the movement was designated 0231. HMT did away with finer cosmetic finishing of the movement components to cut costs.

          The Citizen 0201 movement. Image credit Christoph Lorenz

          The HMT 020 Movement. Image credit Christoph Lorenz

In terms of quality, these HMT movements are pretty well made, and the difference between the Citizen and HMT movements are just a few details, such as lack of decoration or simpler jewel bushes. The HMT 020 is a mens' size handwound movement with 17 jewels and a large Glucydur balance, which is beared in two Citizen Parashock protections. It is constructed in a traditional way with a direct driven center second and a center minute wheel. There are a few variations of this basic movement. The 020/0231 is the basic handwind with centre seconds (HMT Pilot, Janata, Kohinoor etc.), 0232 is another handwind movement but without centre seconds (HMT Ankit), 0233 with offset seconds (HMT Kaushal and the TBC-OC pocket watch), 1809 with centre seconds and non quickset date (HMT Tareeq and Ravi). The 0203 and its variants are still made 100% in house and are the mainstay mechanical movements for HMT. 

That is so cool! Are they still making watches?

As of today HMT is still making their handwind movements completely in house, and watches are still being produced albeit at a much slower rate and most of their models have become difficult to track and connoisseurs try to bag the rare models as they come up for sale.

HMT Automatics basically used the Miyota 6500 movement, until very recently, but the tools which were used to produce these movements got old, instead of investing in new tools HMT decided to import the Miyota 8205 movement and redesign the older watches to fit the 8205 movement. The 8205 movement is not a drop in replacement. The watches with 6500 movements will continue to be sold till stocks last but they are not being produced anymore.

The Kedar on the left uses the Miyota 6500 built completely in house and the Kedar Premium, one of the newer models, uses the imported Miyota 8205.

They have a website, but I found that it is rarely updated. The models on the site differ drastically from the range that is offered.

By the way, did you know they make skeleton watches too ? Here is a snap of their skeleton automatic watch, which you can pick up for Rs 9000/-

 

I bet that’s the cheapest skeleton automatic you can buy brand new in India. And man, it was cool to see the dials behind churning !

And they do make chronograph’s too. Here are the two chronographs I saw on display, which are priced at Rs 6000/-. And yep, all the dials work.

The chronographs and skeletons are not available on the HMT website.

 

Here are some more shots of the display case and from their latest catalogue:

The Hunt for the HMT

 

Lately, I have been  obsessed by automatic watches. Again. I have been fighting this addiction many times over the last decade, but this time I decided to finally get myself an automatic watch.

I decided to ditch the Sonata Quartz watch I have been wearing for the past 12 years and get myself a brand new one for my wedding. I began searching on the internet for the best deals, and I started running into posts and blogs about automatic watches. For the youngsters from the current flashy-colorful-watches generation, these are watches which use a purely mechanical movement converting the wearer’s hand motion to drive the watch, and therefore never requires a battery change. Even now when I try to explain the mechanism of such a watch to a newbie, I am myself still surprised at the micro-mechanical engineering marvel behind such a watch. Even more surprising is the fact that the basic technology is more than 200 years old ! There were no computers or simulators or robots back then, and horologists had to create such watches entirely by hand. The art of making and repairing automatic watches is dying fast, there are not many watch companies who would invest time and money into such machines in India.

The irony of such watches is that automatics are always priced expensive to quartz watches, but they lack the accuracy of quartz movement. You can buy a quartz for a few hundred rupees in India, digital or analog. But to procure a cheap automatic watch, you need at least a few thousand rupees. After visiting numerous showrooms and websites, I concluded that the cheapest branded automatic watches available in Bangalore are from Seiko. The Seiko-5 starts at Rs 6k. Titan’s automatic range starts from Rs 10k. But I was on the hunt for an even cheaper alternative, and my search lead me to HMT, a 60 year old government owned machine tool company.

An HMT commercial from the 90s

HMT’s website mentions some automatic and mechanical movement watches available for online order, and they are priced waaay cheaper than their swiss counterparts. The automatics start at Rs 3000 and you could have a mechanical one for Rs 950 !! But wanted to hold and feel the watches before plunging in. And so I started my hunt to Bangalore’s watch retailers to procure an HMT automatic. It was soon evident that consumers no longer preferred automatics, I could not find even one retailer who had and HMT automatic in stock. Turns out others too have tried and failed; read Sidin Vadukut’s story on hunting an HMT.

I finally decided to go to the source, took down the address of HMT’s Bangalore factory outlet, and got on the bus. The outlet nearest to me was in the Unity building near the corporation offices, you have to get down at the corporation stop, and walk about 1 km to the ancient site. Towards the back of the two storied buildings is the factory showroom, and walking in was like walking into some government office.

The two middle aged men were in deep talk, and did not seem interested in selling anything. When I mentioned I was looking for automatics, they raised eyebrows, and pointed me to the single display case which housed two rows of mechanicals and two of automatics. The cheapest one was priced at Rs 4k. They had a cool skeleton version which was not available on the website, and was priced at Rs 9k.

Right across the factory outlet was another smaller watch shop, and its proprietor, My Sathyanarayana showed me his humble collection of automatics. Sathyanarayana has been running his shop, Sri Lakshmi Times, for 45 years. His children also know watch repair, and are carrying forward the dying art form. He had second hand vintage automatics from Rs 800, and even showed me a sold tourbillion in perfect working condition !!

Mr G. Sathyanarayana, the ever helpful proprietor.

Automatics Galore !

There were rows and rows of HMT watches on display; now this not something you get to see daily. Click on the pictures for full sizes.

 

I finally decided on an HMT Sourab Premium, which I found beautiful (looks like a Rolex Datejust)  and not too heavy to carry around. I am going to gift this to my dad on his birthday coming up soon.

I also noticed a very beautiful pre-owned Seiko 5 automatic for sale, and quickly picked it up. It has a glass back to show off the automatic movement !

Real mechanical watches are on a spiritual level. Some people will never get that. The micro-engineering behind an automatic can only be truly understood by an engineer. That’s why my dad loved them. That’s why I love them.

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What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution

What Major World Cities Look Like at Night, Minus the Light Pollution:

San Francisco 37° 48′ 30″ N 2010-10-9 Lst 20:58. © Thierry Cohen.

Last week in Collage, I interviewed Caleb Cain Marcus, a New York City-based photographer who spent the last two years documenting glaciers around the world. When he composed his photographs of glaciers in Iceland, New Zealand, Norway and Alaska, Marcus obscured the actual horizon. It was an experiment, he explained, to see how it affected his viewers’ sense of scale.
The idea was born out of the Colorado native’s own experience with city living. “Living in New York City, unless you live very high up, you never see the horizon, which is really kind of odd,” said Marcus. “I’m not sure we are really aware of the effects of not being able to see it.”
In a similar vein, French photographer Thierry Cohen worries about city dwellers not being able to see the starry sky. With light and air pollution plaguing urban areas, it is not as if residents can look up from their streets and roof decks to spot constellations and shooting stars. So, what effect does this have? Cohen fears, as he recently told the New York Times, that the hazy view has spawned a breed of urbanite, sheltered by his and her manmade environs, that “forgets and no longer understands nature.”

Tokyo 35° 41′ 36″ N 2011-11-16 Lst 23:16. © Thierry Cohen.

Three years ago, Cohen embarked on a grand plan to help remedy this situation. He’d give city dwellers a taste of what they were missing. The photographer crisscrossed the globe photographing cityscapes from Shanghai to Los Angeles to Rio de Janeiro, by day—when cars’ head and taillights and lights shining from the windows of buildings were not a distraction. At each location, Cohen diligently recorded the time, angle, latitude and longitude of the shot. Then, he journeyed to remote deserts and plains at corresponding latitudes, where he pointed his lens to the night sky. For New York, that meant the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. For Hong Kong, the Western Sahara in Africa. For Rio and São Paulo, the Atacama Desert in Chile, and for Cohen’s native Paris, the prairies of northern Montana. Through his own digital photography wizardry, Cohen created seamless composites of his city and skyscapes.

Rio de Janeiro 22° 56′ 42″ S 2011-06-04 Lst 12:34. © Thierry Cohen.

“By traveling to places free from light pollution but situated on precisely the same latitude as his cities (and by pointing his camera at the same angle in each case), he obtains skies which, as the world rotates about its axis, are the very ones visible above the cities a few hours earlier or later,” writes photography critic Francis Hodgson, in an essay featured on Cohen’s Web site. “He shows, in other words, not a fantasy sky as it might be dreamt, but a real one as it should be seen.”

Paris 48° 50′ 55″ N 2012-08-13 Lst 22:15. © Thierry Cohen.

Cohen’s meticulousness pays off. While he could present a clear night sky taken at any latitude, he instead captures the very night sky that, in megacities, is hidden from sight. The photographer keeps some details of his process a secret, it seems. So, I can only suspect that Cohen takes his picture of a city, determines what the night sky looks like in that city on that day and then quickly travels to a remote area to find the same night sky viewed from a different location. This precision makes all the difference. “Photography has always had a very tight relationship to reality,” Hodgson goes on to say. “A good sky is not the right sky. And the right sky in each case has a huge emotional effect.”
It is an emotional effect, after all, that Cohen desires. The photographer wants his “Darkened Cities” series, now on display at Danziger Gallery in New York City, to raise awareness about light pollution. Spoken like a true artist, Cohen told the New York Times, that he wants to show the detached urbanite the stars “to help him dream again.”

New York 40° 44′ 39″ N 2010-10-13 Lst 0:04. © Thierry Cohen.

“There is an urban mythology which is already old, in which the city teems with energy and illumines everything around it. All roads lead to Rome, we are told. Cohen is telling us the opposite,” writes Hodgson. “It is impossible not to read these pictures the way the artist wants them read: cold, cold cities below, cut off from the seemingly infinite energies above. It’s a powerful reversal, and one very much in tune with a wave of environmental thinking of the moment.”

Hong Kong 22° 16′ 38″ N 2012-03-22 Lst 14:00. © Thierry Cohen.

Los Angeles 34° 03′ 20″ N 2010-10-09 Lst 21:50. © Thierry Cohen.

Shanghai 31° 13′ 22″ N 2012-03-17 Lst 14:47. © Thierry Cohen.

New York 40° 42′ 16″ N 2010-10-9 Lst 3:40. © Thierry Cohen.

São Paulo 23° 33′ 22″ S 2011-06-05 Lst 11:44. © Thierry Cohen.

“Darkened Cities” is on display at Danziger Gallery through May 4, 2013.