A Titan's Story: Xerxes Desai & The Making Of A Homegrown Watchmaker

I was in my early teens when my mother bought me my first grown-up watch. It was a Titan chronograph meant to keep time during exams. The Ramakrishna Mission school where I studied had a reputation for its disciplinarianism: digital watches (which sometimes had a calculator function) and phones were strictly prohibited. Quartz watches, on the other hand, were seen as serious tools for serious students. By the eighth standard, most of my classmates and I had outgrown our beloved Finding Nemo and Toy Story-branded watches and moved on to quartz chronographs. Most were made by Titan, either handed down from fathers and grandfathers, or gifted as presents — signs that we were growing up after all.

I remember Titan watches, with their sleek, millennial modern ads featuring the iconic theme — a delightful adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K. 183 (1st movement) — were almost aspirational back then. I saw them on the wrists of men I admired. English teachers at school, artists at art galleries, and my mentor, a former photojournalist who freelanced for some of Kolkata’s best English newspapers. I was fascinated by them. I wanted to be like them. Most of them wore watches, and most of them wore Titan watches. It was almost like a talisman that represented a certain kind of man: serious, well-read, and above all, punctual. No wonder I wanted a Titan chronograph. The wonderful ads set to Mozart’s 25th only added to the myth.

I suppose that is the power of branding and marketing. But there is also something more that makes brands like Titan stand out. It’s almost as if they carry the spirit of the people who created them. For Titan, this was Xerxes Desai, its legendary founder and first managing director, who forever changed the flow of time in India.

Desai founded Titan in 1984, at a time when most Indians wore functional, Soviet-influenced mechanical timepieces made by Hindustan Machine Tools Limited (HMT). They were purely utilitarian tools which kept time but could not keep up with time. While Indian elites wore imported timepieces, the growing middle class had no other choice. With Titan, a joint venture between the Tata Group and the Tamil Nadu Industrial Development Corporation (TIDCO), Desai decided to do something about it.

Titan Watches Limited was incorporated on July 26, 1984, with a clear ambition: to bring the quartz revolution to India. Desai — educated in Oxford and trained through stints at Tata Chemicals, Taj Hotels, and the Tata Press — was a man who understood that a watch is never purely functional. It is an object of desire, a statement piece, a social signal worn on the wrist. He saw the future in quartz technology and, crucially, realised that the aspirational Indian wanted and deserved something elegant.

Soon, Titan’s first manufacturing unit was set up in Hosur, a small industrial town in Tamil Nadu. Desai built the workforce from scratch — training school and college leavers, many of them from the surrounding villages, into precision craftspeople over years. The first Titan watch was released in February 1987, and by December of that same year, Titan had opened its first dedicated showroom at Safina Plaza in Bengaluru, Desai’s adopted hometown. Within two years, the company sold a million watches.

Through the 1990s, as the Indian economy liberalised and household incomes increased, Titan transformed into a cultural cartographer of India. The company understood that India’s aspirations were not uniform, and it built a sub-brand architecture that mapped those aspirations with remarkable precision. In 2003, Titan launched ‘Fastrack’ as a youth-focused brand: irreverent, colourful, and unconcerned with propriety. In 2006, Titan spun off ‘Raga’ as India’s first watch brand exclusively for women. And in 2024, the homegrown watchmaker’s 40th anniversary, Titan launched India’s first flying tourbillon movement — a piece of precision watchmaking so intricate it is considered a rite of passage for any horological house.

Xerxes Desai passed away in 2016 at the age of seventy-nine. But four decades on, Titan remains what he dreamt it to be: not only a timekeeper, but a mirror held up to the modern Indian self — aspirational, precise, and proud of its own heritage.

Read Vinay Kamath’s book ‘Titan: Inside India’s Most Successful Consumer Brand’ to learn more. ‘Made in India: A Titan Story’, a web-series based on the book, premieres on June 3, 2026, on Amazon MX Player.

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