Know Your City: Inside Bengaluru’s world of vintage watches and time-worn clocks

4 min readBengaluruUpdated: Jun 10, 2026 01:59 PM IST

Paul D’Souza (left) and Nikhil Kaundinya (right) have a shared love for vintage watches and clocks. (Photo credit: Special arrangement)

For as long as he can remember, Paul D’Souza has always been fascinated by watches and clocks. The 60-year-old Whitefield resident in Bengaluru says the interest extended to opening up clocks to try and replicate mechanisms he had once seen in a clockwork automaton at the Salar Jung Museum.

By his teenage years, D’Souza, an assistive vision technologies consultant, learned to restore clocks and watches—a passion that would eventually culminate in a meeting with the legendary British watchmaker George Daniels, whose textbook he had once relied on.

“I get a lot of my old parts and spares from old watchmakers who shut shop because the quartz revolution killed a lot of mechanical businesses,” says D’Souza, referring to the ‘quartz crisis’ of the 1970s when battery-powered quartz watches posed a threat to traditional mechanical watchmaking.

D’Souza is a part of a small community of vintage watch enthusiasts in Bengaluru who have found new reasons to follow their passion: an appreciation for precision craftsmanship, an eye for history, and perhaps even nostalgia for a slower era.

D’Souza has restored several antique clocks and watches after teaching himself horology, the study of measuring time and the art of making timekeeping instruments. In cases where the parts are unavailable, he says he simply makes a replacement with a watchmaker’s lathe. “You can make the bigger parts for clocks and pocket watches… When it gets to wristwatch size, the equipment is more specialised,” he explains.

Like D’Souza, Mysuru-based engineer Nikhil Kaundinya is passionate about watches. A watch collector and a member of the Bangalore Vintage Horological Club, the 39-year-old says, “There is a lot of connect with mechanical watches in the region since Hindustan Machine Tools (HMT) was based in Bangalore. I have been collecting watches for about 15-16 years now.”

Two antique watches from the personal collection of Bangalore Vintage Horological Club founder Kiran Munipalle. (Photo credit: Kiran Munipalle)

From Rs 500 to Rs 5 lakh

While one’s mind might immediately go to the pricier options when thinking about watch collecting, Kaundinya, who frequently visits Bengaluru to attend club meetings, says that this is not the case. “There is no high-brow mentality that you should only collect a Rolex or whatever. You can have a Rs 500 vintage watch or a Rs 5 lakh vintage watch. As long as you like watches, people are welcome in almost all watch-collecting communities,” he observes.

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Bengaluru’s vintage watch collectors also have to contend with restoration and servicing. This has become considerably easier in the age of WhatsApp and social media, as enthusiasts no longer have to rely solely on word‑of‑mouth to find reliable sources for parts or knowledgeable mechanics. Even acquiring these watches has largely shifted online—though the flea markets of Bengaluru remain places where a rare find can still be made.

Repairing these watches is not as hard, though. “You might get one serviced every three or four years, as these are mechanical timepieces. As long as they are not abused, they are quite self-sustaining,” says Kaundinya.

While D’Souza mostly restores timepieces for his own collection, sometimes a piece is beautiful or unique enough that he lends a hand to some of his friends. “It is a joy and privilege to get your hands on a really classy specimen and bring it back to life…clocks like cuckoo clocks and grandfather clocks are not hard (to restore), but it gives me great joy to restore them,” he adds.