Gold Rush

India’s appetite for gold reminds one of the last-man-standing-approach as the sole parameter for a life well lived.

Gold is insurance against risk. You quietly plan for an unfortunate event that you are sure will happen. I suspect gold lovers by nature feel that problems won’t be wholly solved. We are the world’s biggest consumers of gold. Imagine building a country with gold bricks of disbelief?

Gold in the head

Next to gold, we love real estate. Even if you waste a lifetime paying loans for one house or a multitude of houses, apartments and scraps of land scattered from your home state to your city of choice, the wasted life eventually vindicates itself as appreciating investment. For no matter what, in a country that is three times the population of the US and one-third its size, real estate is bound to command value. It is nearly gold. The mess of our numbers in the present or our still rising population, doesn’t matter. For, in the long run we are making gold.

Inspired, we have augmented the paradigm of giant population in a not so giant space by encouraging the alchemy of squeezing into still more limited spaces, like cities. Uniquely, if creativity be what you do after addressing the essentials of life, our ‘golden’ life celebrates the basics as a perennial rat race. Nothing fuels gold as much as fundamental insecurity. There we remain, trapped. We value gold and real estate higher than knowledge, which — in the golden matrix of assessing life — does not contribute much to survival. A library in the head never meant gold in the bank or gold under your feet. But gold in the head tells you how to use knowledge for more gold in life.

Picture of survival

Studying our ‘golden’ thoughts would help us understand why we behave the way we do and whether it will ever be possible to make Indians value process and journey over goal, manufacturing over trading margins.

From our journey with metals in less harried times, we know that they can be melted and recast. But will you recast gold as anything less, to help us notice the journey and not merely covet the monetised result? Will you replace gold and its value ridden perspective with something more liberating — something that perhaps acknowledges the supremacy of awareness over how you manipulate that knowledge to be the last man standing?

The whole world collapses and there is last man standing with his pot of gold and plot of land. It is a picture of survival, an endorsement of natural law. But if all else is in ruin and there is no knowledge around to breathe value to gold, of what use is your pot of gold?

And if none else stands and the whole world is yours, of what value is the land under your feet? If you know what is gold, how it is born, where it is found, what it does and still have no craving for it, are you a loser? If you own no house and count the universe as address, are you homeless?

(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)