The recent talk of avoiding ‘non-essential’ purchase of gold to conserve foreign exchange holdings offers food for thought. How on earth did a shiny metal ever manage to acquire ‘essential’ status? No medical condition indicates patients suffering from a lack of gold.

India imports nearly all its gold: Domestic production is negligible, so consumer demand directly translates into dollar outflows. In FY26, India imported about 72 billion dollars’ worth of gold, nearly 10% of the total import bill. The forex reserves fell by 37 billion dollars in just two months due to oil and gold imports plus capital outflows. Oil, we need, surely. But why gold? There’s no reason to import gold in any quantity. A total ban on import of precious metals should be welcome, and the popularity of such a move should be put to the test.

Gold, silver, platinum are the so-called precious metals. Precious to whom, exactly? You can’t eat them, Sure, you can nibble on vark — the gold or silver foil in a fancy mithai like barfi, kaju katli, and laddoos—but it’s basically edible glitter: no taste, no nutrition, and your body remains unimpressed.

Strip away the scarcity, and gold is just a shiny metal that only has value because people agree to pretend it does. If tomorrow every country unearthed a thousand tonnes of bullion each, their price and value would disintegrate faster than a paper umbrella in the monsoon rain.” Without rarity, gold is just a metal with delusions of grandeur. Platinum, we are told, is the aristocrat of metals. Platinum is rare, and its main uses are in catalytic converters and jewellery. Strip away the marketing gloss, and platinum is basically luxury aluminium with a better PR team.

Diamonds are chemically just carbon, the same stuff as in pencil lead. Pencil-lead and diamonds share the same chemical DNA, but one writes grocery lists and the other empties bank accounts. Their sparkle is more about intricate cutting than mystical properties. If you squint from a foot away, you wouldn’t be able to distinguish diamond from cut glass. The diamond industry thrives on marketing slogans like “A diamond is forever,” which is true if you mean the forever it takes to pay off the loan.

In our fascination for glitter, how are we different from moths? Humans flutter toward jewellery counters, hypnotised by the shine, and convinced that scarcity equals sophistication. A moth looks at humans buying gold jewellery and says, “Wow, even we wouldn’t fall for that.” So, what is the intrinsic value of gold, platinum, and diamonds? None, except the value we invent. They are mirrors reflecting our vanity, symbols of scarcity masquerading as sophistication. Like moths circling chandeliers, dazzled by gloss, mistaking sparkle for substance. The joke is not on the people selling gold, it’s on us for buying them.

Granted, there are “scientific uses” too. Precious metals are useful in electronics, aerospace, medicine, and so on, but only in tiny amounts. Nobody needs a kilo of gold to fix delicate electronic circuits. It is in the social sphere of Indians that precious metals as ornaments play on people’s lives. They decide marital alliances foremost. The lives of those who can ill-afford the gold extravaganza are affected most.

In provincial southern India especially, the gold obsession is entrenched. Though it is none of anyone’s business, culturally everyone is programmed to get agitated if women are not toting the required grams of gold on their person according to their perceived economic status. A woman with a bare neck or with less than the socially approved gold-load on her person gets free advice from all and sundry about the need to rectify the shortfall. Weddings without jangling jewellery should be the new social liberation movement. Ultimately, gold, platinum, and diamonds are not about utility — they are about status. We wear glittery metals not to survive, but to signal wealth. Humanity’s obsession with shiny things is less about need and more about the desperate urge to impress.

These attitudes take time to change. If everyone suddenly shunned gold, the multi-billion-dollar jewellery industry would collapse. That would be the bullion Industry’s nightmare. They may scream apocalypse, but it would liberate women from being walking gold vaults. And finally, jewellery ads would have to be reinvented: “This season, impress your neighbours with stainless steel. It’s rust-resistant and lasts a lifetime.”

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