Alchemy of gold

I am wearing something that sits light on my neck but heavy on my pockets. Gold. Yes, that relic. The shiny metal people have been losing their mind and money over for thousands of years. Though honestly, there was a time when nobody cared. It was lying around in rivers.

Of all the metals our planet holds, eight were considered truly valuable. But gold always stood apart. Among those eight, most were either too rare to find or too stubborn to melt. Hence, we are left with gold and silver. And silver? It loses shine but gold never does. The Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, Aztec, every civilization, without ever talking to each other, landed on gold. It is not because someone has told them to, but everything else has a catch but gold didn’t.

Yellow printed its colour in real time. In antiquity, gold was collected by rivers, without thinking of its value. It was something that we adore as it does not rust and always looks good. Then it became a coin, where it evolved from a mere ornament to a monetary standard. By the 1900s, every dollar in your pocket was backed by gold, fixed at $35 per ounce. Then the 1980s happened, gold plunged over 2,300% from $35 to $850 per ounce due to inflation, oil crises, and geopolitical situations. Later, as the world reeled from the 2008 financial crisis, guess what? Gold hit $1,921. Sometimes I wonder what spell this relic cast, even atrocities couldn’t break it.

From the Stone Age to today, the shine of yellow has grown from being a mere metal to an anchor for economies in crisis. We live in the age of digitisation, crypto, and paper money, but gold touched $5,400 per ounce in 2026. Yes, we invented a thousand alternatives to this yellow metal, but we still ran back to it, just like no matter how many cities we conquer, how many countries we settle in, or how many lives we build elsewhere, we always long for home. Gold is our home. It was the first thing we trusted and settled into, and in our bones, it remains the last.

Road towards sustainability

The stark reality is that the modern global economy still runs overwhelmingly on gold. It is absurd to see how seriously people have taken this gold and collectively agreed that this shiny metal is worth fighting over. In the present scenario, the geopolitical turmoil displays a ironic scene, where the U.S. declares that the dollar is supreme and gold is no longer needed. But later it silently reserves 8,133 tonnes of gold in its locker, just in case.

Our world is dealing with so many things simultaneously, from geopolitical tensions to economic pressures on nations to climate change to massive structural shifts in technology and digital infrastructure. What we envisage is not gold in vaults but critical minerals that drive industries.

Several studies substantiate the claim that there are few critical minerals better than gold and possess rich properties. A few examples are rhodium, palladium, and iridium, which are considered more precious because of their natural scarcity, industrial and technological application. Iridium is a rare metal, and the world needs it badly. Green hydrogen, a fuel everyone is betting on for a cleaner future, cannot be produced without it. Then there’s rhodium and palladium; every car on the road has them quietly doing the dirty work, by converting toxic fumes into something the air can handle. These aren’t investment metals. They’re metals with work. These metals are building the future we are heading into, by powering us with clean energy, improving air quality and opening roads for technologies we haven’t fully invented yet. But we can play smart here: what if every country secures and specialised in one critical mineral, so that no single nation could hold the world hostage the way they do with gold or oil today.

The world today is no longer following one leader, one currency or one system. The nations are securing their own resources, reducing dependence on anything that one country can control and further building their own alliances. Recently India and the U.S. signed a bilateral framework to secure the supply and processing of critical minerals and a separate framework was also announced among Quad countries. Simply put, the shift is already here — critical minerals are quietly becoming the new gold. So, will silver finally get its moment? Will rhodium become the next great obsession? Will iridium rise in aerospace, or has gold bribed our generation enough to secure its reputation forever?

niharika.shahi.in@gmail.com