Feature

Exhibition of Mechanical Watches

Taslima Rawshan

Exhibition of 100 years old mechanical watches is an implausible idea of a man named Ahmed Asif Ashraf (Mishu) a final year student of Applied physics, University of Dhaka. He has been collecting mechanical watches for last so many years. He is a mechanical watch collector and it's his hobby to collect watches.

A solo exhibition on collected mechanical watches was held at Zainul gallery-1 of Institute of Fine arts in University of Dhaka. It started from 1st June and continued to the 5th of June, 2007. Each day from 11 AM to 8 PM the exhibition was open to all.

The exhibition was eye catching. Nearly 200 mechanical watches (including fabulous ladies and gents collections) were displayed. Each had different identities and attributes, had different looks, colors. Some were 100 yeas old. Seven country's nearly 200 watches were exhibited and all these were of 48 renowned brands. Some of the brands were Rado, Tissot, UTC, Seiko and Omega. Almost all those watches are collected from Old Dhaka, some from outside of Dhaka and few are collected from his father and relatives who used to use those many years ago. A multimedia show was arranged where displayed watches in the exhibition hall were shown including their features, model numbers, manufacturing company's names, year when those were produced and used etc.

A remarkable feature of the watches was many had small pieces of glasses and rubies known as jewels. It refers to the number of jewels each corresponding watches have inside the movement.

There was a Swiss made “SECUNDUS” pocket watch in the exhibition that was of 1950s which was really exceptional one. The system to see the time is different. There is a cover on the glass which is to be opened by pushing the crown to see the time. He has one officially certified chronometer which means highly accurate and reliable watch. He also has another hand wound watch which tics 10 times a second. There was a watch in the exhibition which he bought from Kolkata and is named after Sachin Tendulkar, the master batsman of India.

This was an unusual exhibition that caught everyone's attention.