Partho Pretom Sarker wears a Citizen. It has, what I’m told, a “tiger-eye” dial,and was made in Japan sometime in the 1980s.
He didn't buy it new, and that was the whole point.
At just 19 years old, he goes looking for old mechanical watches that he then brings back to life.
“People say men are not sentimental,” he says. “I think that is wrong. A man will walk five kilometres for a ten-taka cup of tea from one specific stall not because the tea is better, but the memory or the importance the tea stall holds.”
Watches, in his telling, work the same way. Nobody's nostalgic about the object. They're nostalgic about the hands that potentially used to wear it. They are nostalgic about the time period.
So why does he do it? To understand, you have to go back further than Partho does. Much further.
Right after 1971, Bangladeshi men started leaving for the Middle East in serious numbers, chasing work in Saudi Arabia, Oman, Qatar, and Malaysia.
They came home eventually, and they came home with gifts. The most popular thing to bring back for your loved ones, your father, brother or even for yourself, was a mechanical watch.
A Seiko or a Citizen wasn't just a watch. It was proof you'd been somewhere. It read as competence, as status.
Then quartz happened, and none of that mattered anymore.
From the mid-'70s onward, battery-powered watches flooded the market. No more winding, no maintenance. The big Japanese watchmakers -- Seiko, Citizen, Orient -- pivoted hard into mass production.
Some Swiss brands retreated into pure luxury. Smaller names just disappeared.
And in Dhaka, a small community of watchmakers who'd trained abroad and had come home to service the mechanical watches watched their skills go quiet.
By the time the century turned, Dhaka's mechanical watches had ended up in one of two places -- the back of a drawer or the bin.
This is where Partho comes in, sourcing old watches from collectors.
Not everything he finds can be saved. Knowing which watch is worth restoring and which one is beyond it is, he says, half the actual craft.
What survives goes to the handful of technicians left in the country who still remember how to disassemble a mechanical movement, clean it, regulate it, and put it back together without losing a spring. Then it finds someone new to belong to.
A lot of what comes through the door isn't for sale at all. Like a grandfather's watch that stopped ticking sometime in the '90s and never got looked at again. “The watch was never really gone,” Partho says. “It just needed someone who knew how to bring it back.”
He owns a business named “Bengal Curator.” Naming the business “Curator” wasn't an accident, either.
He talks about it as an act of resistance against a very specific, very current condition-- a mass-produced world.
Finding something old and beautiful, and actually giving it attention, started to feel like a strange, almost radical thing to do.
If that sounds like a Gen Z problem dressed up in old brass and steel, that's because it is.
Fast fashion has a sibling nobody talks about as much: Fast everything. Fast phones, fast furniture, fast relationships to objects that used to be built to outlive their owners.
Partho didn't start Bengal Curator as some tidy act of cultural preservation, and he doesn't pretend otherwise.
“I built this business out of survival,” he says. It became about love for the objects later.
Maybe that’s the difference between a heritage project funded by someone else's money, and a university student actually needing this to work.
When asked about the work life balance, he said he follows the 80-20 rule.
Eighty percent of what actually moves the needle comes from twenty percent of the work you put in, so the real skill isn't grinding harder, it's figuring out which twenty percent is worth grinding on at all.
That's how he's kept a business, a university degree, and something resembling a social life all running at once without any of them collapsing.
The harder part, he says, wasn't the watches. It was learning to talk to people who'd already decided, on sight, that he was too young to be trusted.
Business in Dhaka, he's found, doesn't run on spreadsheets nearly as much as people assume. It runs on relationships, on trust built slowly.
And the older generation wants to see you've earned the right to be taken seriously before they'll hand you anything real.
What he's actually chasing, underneath the watches themselves, is memories.
Memories of people saving up for a watch, to wear it to a wedding, to gift their loved ones.
Partho wants to hand that memory down, instead of throwing it out. The exact opposite of what the world is like today.
Partho's watch still keeps decent time, all these decades later. Somebody, back in the 1980s, thought carefully enough about buying it that it survived long enough to end up on his wrist.
On the Radar is the new segment in Tribune Z, spotlighting those who dare to take the roads less traveled and excel. Know someone who belongs here, or want to share your own story? Write to us at artsandletters.dt@gmail.com.