It’s not every day that you get to lift the T20 World Cup trophy on behalf of your team and country so it’s fitting that you pick the best possible watch for the occasion. For the Indian cricket team’s captain Rohit Sharma, that watch was the Audemars Piguet Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar. Created in very limited numbers exclusively for the Japanese market, Audemars Piguet released the watch globally in 2021. Only an additional 150 pieces were made available worldwide, making this a very rare timepiece. Priced at approximately Rs 1.5 crore after taxes, it’s not stratospherically expensive. Not for a hero like Rohit Sharma. However, it’s not the price alone that determines the worth of this watch, it’s how well-finished, how rare, and tasteful it is.
The watch has a titanium case and bracelet, a gorgeous and understated salmon Grand Tapisserie dial and a perpetual calendar grand complication. All-in-all, it’s got everything from day, date, week, astronomical moon, leap year, and hour and minute indications. The titanium frame means it manages to grab the eye – a tall order when sharing the limelight with the World Cup trophy – but if any watch can manage it, it’s this.
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This Royal Oak features an in-house Calibre 5134 featuring the thinnest full rotor automatic movement, has a forty-hour power reserve, and is water resistant up to 20 metres. None of that really matters because its presence on Rohit Sharma’s wrist means that it has gone from iconic to immortal. Thankfully, unlike several region-specific limited edition watches, it does not possess any motifs or logos pertaining to said region or country, that would disqualify it from being worn on an occasion as prestigious as this.
It’s now permanently embedded in the annals of Indian history. That and the fact that only 300 units were ever produced and half of them were sent to the island of Japan, making this an unusual find.
It also helps shed some light on the man of the hour – Rohit Sharma’s – sartorial taste. It’s not an ultra-light Richard Mille, it’s not a time-tested Rolex, it’s not even a can-be-spotted-from-a-mile Royal Oak Offshore. It’s a restrained, exquisitely crafted watch made even rarer by the fact that Audemars Piguet does not produce anywhere near as many limited edition timepieces as it used to at the turn of the millennium.