The surprising response to a question in a quiz was alarming, as much as it was eye-opening. The venue was the swanky AV room of an international school in a western suburb. As part of a visual, Mumbai-themed quiz, a question to name the famous clock tower facing Oval Maidan was posed to middle-schoolers. I was expecting it to be a ‘sitter’, to use quizzing parlance. Quite the contrary happened. All that wafted across the room after the question was dropped, were a range of incorrect chirps by voices emanating from blank faces. Even Big Ben was thrown in as a possible answer. If you’re still wondering, the correct answer is Rajabai Tower. As I began to explain the relevance of this landmark to the group, I realised that they, and the coming generations, would never realise the importance of clock towers in context to our cityscapes, and how its citizens literally, ‘looked up’ to them, in more ways than one.

The mind immediately wandered back to two years ago, when I had interacted with Hyderabad-based horologist Venkatesh Rao, who returned to Mumbai to work his magic on Byculla’s Christ Church clock. At the time, this ‘OG tick-tocker’ [we couldn’t resist the word-play], succeeded in making it the oldest operational public timepiece in the city.