The Real Gold

“As good as gold” – was how good Tiny Tim was in Charles Dickens’ 1843 novel A Christmas Carol. “Judged by sales, the Prius is the gold standard of hybrid cars” – was the opinion of car enthusiast K. C. Colwell in the March 2020 issue of the magazine Car and Driver.

Separated by a time period of 177 years, two people judging two entirely different entities did so by holding it up to the same standard – gold. And why not? Since antiquity, gold has been the ultimate standard of wealth, value and stability. In fact, the ‘gold standard’ evolved as a monetary system in which the value of a country’s currency was directly linked to the gold reserves in its underground vaults.

The precious metal, however, was never just an abstract economic entity; it also served as a standard for judging personal attributes. One could have a ‘heart of gold’. A treasured gift was ‘worth its weight in gold’. A person down on his luck might get a ‘golden opportunity’ to ‘strike gold’. And the ‘golden rule’ to remember was that ‘all that glitters is not gold’.

Over time, though, an inconspicuous thing with none of the glamour and glitter of gold came to challenge the latter’s position in the world order. It didn’t unseat gold from the proverbial ‘golden chair’; it, however, became the new star kid with a global fan following. Where gold had offered stability, the new kid literally offered mobility. The beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1760 heralded in a new era – the Age of Oil. The new kid, colloquially known as ‘black gold’ or crude oil, went from being a niche material to the backbone of global energy production. While metallic gold became the monetary reserve to be stocked up for use in emergencies, black gold became the lifeblood of global economy. In a world where people no longer ate only what grew in their backyards, oil became the new currency. Countries that had stockpiled on gold bars but had no access to crude oil suddenly realized that they couldn’t eat their gold reserves to survive. They desperately needed oil to manufacture fertilizers for their crops, transport the produce to markets, and power the gas stoves of families cooking their dinner. The cost of war was being calculated, not in terms of lives lost or suffering inflicted, but in terms of the surge in oil prices and the rippling effect on the global economy.

All this while, though, there was another golden kid lurking in the shadows. It had none of the pretense of the other two, neither the spell of metallic gold, nor the haughtiness of black gold. It was the clearest, purest, and the most transparent of them all. Most importantly, it was free for all. You did not have to go searching for it in mines, or extract it from the heart of Earth. It could be flowing by your home, showering on you, or powering your very existence. In fact, right now, it makes up nearly 60% of the ‘you’ reading these words. Without the liquid gold, also known as water, coursing through your veins and sustaining every cell of your body, there is no ‘you’.