Eternal Glitter
INDIA’S OLDEST SCRIPTURE, the Rig Veda, has a hymn to Prajapati, the lord of creation. The translation by Ralph TH Griffith goes: “In the beginning rose Hiranyagarbha, born Only Lord of all created beings. He fixed and holds up this earth and heaven.” The god is the first to exist, but how does he come about? As a golden embryo, the meaning of Hiranyagarbha. Picture the Vedic composer then, a sage belonging to one of the priestly clans, with his eyes closed as he runs through the lines in his mind in the middle of a sylvan forest, wondering what to make the embryo out of. What is it that will most please the god when he sings the hymn? Gold, of course, and there are reasons for it. The metal is pure. It doesn’t tarnish. It radiates colour, and when worn, makes the wearer radiate. It is not as if gold became desirable around 1500 BCE when the Rig Veda was being composed. Long before that, other civilisations were obsessed with it and you could probably trace it to even earlier. Man conquered the earth through the making of fire, and would not gold be just like fire in appearance when they discovered it?
There is more than purity making it coveted. The metal is also rare, with only a limited quantity existing on the planet. Take all the gold in the world, and it would be a cube inside four large swimming pools. Ownership of such an element, so scant and with so much effulgence, says something about the owner—he has stature because he can afford its possession, he has taste because it adds to his personality when worn. This can take unusual forms even now. Gangsters of the Mumbai underworld have a tradition of adorning themselves with gold chains and rings. Remember the layers of necklaces on Circuit, the sidekick to Munnabhai? Filmmaker Raju Hirani was merely digging into that phenomenon.