Patek Phillipe

“You never really own a Patek Phillipe, you merely look after it for the next generation” – the permanence that this ad tag-line suggested caught my attention when I was in college and began my fascination with watches. I was initially flabbergasted why someone would pay thousands of dollars to buy ‘ultra luxury’ watches that use complex mechanical movements to perform functions that a cheap quartz watch can perform at a fraction of the cost. For example, an automatic watch that is powered by the physical movement of the wrist can lose upto 12 minutes a month when a quartz watch powered by a battery loses practically no time. Of course, to ensure accuracy in an automatic watch you need to buy a really high-end ‘caliber automatic’ rather than a ‘standard automatic’. I have realized that there is no objective explanation to this indulgence - it is similar to buying art rather than buying a photograph, you really pay for an extremely complex solution to a problem that has a simpler solution. It is also a celebration of your success and you buy it just ‘because you can’.