The main components are all upcycled - dials repainted and movements repaired and serviced. Cost-effectiveness, serviceability, and availability were key factors in choosing the movement. Wanting to create a simple enough piece, the 36mm steel watch features an HMT 0231 movement, with a power reserve of upto 40 hours. Maniyappan designed the dial as well, and considerable time went into getting the design just right the final iteration was the 29 th one created. The numerals were crafted as bold and simple to give the watch a contemporary look that is appealing to a new age watch enthusiast,” explains Nishad. “The watch had to look classy and elegant but not dated. This is represented on the hand-painted black dial watch by way of an inner track, where a small triangle indicates the completion of one Nazhika. When converted to standard international time, a Nazhika is 24 minutes.

One Nazhika is the time taken by the earth to rotate six degrees (a day therefore divided into 60 Nazhikas). Traditionally in Kerala, time is measured in terms of Nazhika and Vinazhika, with reference to sunrise. 'This was when it struck me the ideal name for this project should be Nazhika,' says Nishad. Armed with this information, another member of the group, Dilip Maniyappan, a graphic designer, designed a font specifically for Malayalam numericals to be represented on the dial. The group then approached notable poet and former Head of Malayalam Department at University of Kerala, Dr Desamangalam Ramakrishnan, who explained that Malayalam numericals did exist and were in use until 1980s in Malayalam books, after which Arabic numerals took over. Sohan suggested we look into Malayalam numerals, as he had seen them being used as page numbers in an old book.” “We wanted the watch to be an extension of Kerala’s culture and regional inputs.

“As we decided to go further with the project, we were thinking within the group on what theme would we keep for the watch,” says Nishad SN, a member of TimeGrapher who was deeply involved in the development of the timepiece.

Representative of Kerala and its culture, its highlight is the painted hourmarkers in a specially designed Malayalam numerical script. So they struck upon a novel way to do it - they created a new timepiece.įully upcycled, designed, and assembled by and through inputs of group members, the TimeGrapher Nazhika is a minimalistic self-winding watch eponymously named after the traditional way of timekeeping in Kerala. Under lockdown, and house-bound, Balachandran, along with a few TimeGrapher members, wanted to spend time more productively, while also keeping the fledgling community engaged. When Thiruvananthapuram-based Sohan Balachandran launched a Facebook community, followed by an Instagram counterpart, called TimeGrapher in late 2019, the idea behind it was simple - to provide a platform for like-minded watch lovers like himself, to connect.

1 nazhika