For a city always on the go, a 24-hour-clock might seem too inadequate or too little. But in 1996, when Chirodeep Chaudhuri, still a neophyte to photography, started training his lens on public clocks, the latter were almost redundant. "Nobody was looking at them, because most were not working," he remembers. While the analog world was still warming to the digital, the complex technology of the average public clock, was past its prime. Their dysfunctionality and futility poked Chaudhuri, and he would spend the next 23 years, documenting them.

His two-decade-old labour of love will now be on display starting Tuesday at the exhibition, Seeing Time: Public Clocks of Bombay, at Max Mueller Bhavan. The exhibition, which will be on till February 20, will showcase photographs of 81 clocks from across the city, in black and white. "It's not like I have run out of patience," says Chaudhuri, 47, when we meet him not far from CSMT that boasts of a Victorian time-piece, as old as the century-old structure. "I can still keep at it [taking pictures of public clocks]. But something tells me that if there are more, it's got to be just two or three. I have walked so much around the city, and looked so hard, I would know."