Gold Fever

The shop floor of NAC Jewellers, a store in the South Indian city of Madras, is full of exquisitely wrought necklaces in gold and silver, but the prize possession of the owners is a photograph that hangs upstairs in a small office. It shows a tall crown studded with 4,000 diamonds and made from seven kilograms of gold. Four craftsmen from NAC Jewellers spent six months making the crown, at a cost of about $700,000. It now rests on a statue of the goddess Padmavathi Devi at the Tiruchanur Shrine in South India. Anantha Padmanaban, a partner of NAC Jewellers, proudly...