The Quote on the Staircase
Titan's Delhi office was moving to a new office space after more than a decade in the same building. Everyone was excited about the new office. Nobody was talking about what would be lost in the move — until the region's head asked me to do something about it.
The brief was loose: a 30ft wide wall, just outside the conference room in the new office, that would carry some sense. Memory, basically, rendered onto a wall most people would walk past without thinking twice.
I didn't have a clear idea of what that meant yet, so I started asking people. Colleagues who'd been at Titan for years — some since it was still mostly a watch company, before it became the multi-brand, multi-category business it is now. I wanted to know what the place actually meant to the people who'd spent their careers inside it.
I came back with a lot of warmth and not much direction. So I did what designers do when the brief is unclear: I started sketching. Quotes about craftsmanship. Lines about time and precision, since Titan started as a watchmaker. A few attempts at something more poetic about culture and belonging.
None of it worked. Every line I wrote sounded like something a brand would say about itself in an annual report. Confident, polished, and completely hollow.
I mentioned this, half-frustrated, to a manager I used to report to — someone who'd been with the company long enough to remember things most people had forgotten. Instead of giving me a better quote, he took me to the old building's staircase.
There was a small frame on the wall there, easy to miss, glass slightly fogged with age. Inside it, a single line:
No name attached to it. No date. Nobody seemed to remember who had written it or when it had first gone up. It had simply been there, year after year, doing its quiet work while everyone walked past it on their way to meetings.
That was the moment the project actually started. Not when I sat down to write something new, but when I stopped trying to.
The wall I designed didn't try to improve on that line. It tried to earn it. Titan's various brands and categories all shared that floor, so I built the composition around products each brand was known for, arranged loosely around the quote, like everyone finally standing in the same frame instead of separate ones.
I collaborated with a group of artists who brought it to life on the wall.
It's still there. Outlasting the move, outlasting most of the people who saw it go up, including, most likely, whoever wrote the original line in the first place — a sentence that waited years in a stairwell for someone to notice it was already enough.
