Diamonds are forever by Kavita Shivdasani

Saturday 27th March 2010

Deep in the bowels of the earth especially in the regions beneath Africa, Russia, Canada, Australia and our very own Assam mysterious magma movement millions of years ago arranged pure elements of carbon with perfect precision to create one of it’s much sought after allotrope called diamonds.

Story has it that The Eureka diamond is so called because it was the first diamond to be discovered in Africa. A small boy called Erasmus, the son of a widow of the Boer War picked up some pretty stones from the banks of the Orange River. He and his sister used them to play a game called Five Stones. A neighbouring farmer was attracted by one of these pebbles and asked the widow to sell it to him. She laughed and told him to keep this 24.25 carat stone!

The diamonds drawn from an ancient Greek word meaning ‘unbreakable’ or ‘I overpower’ were carried to the earth’s crust by volcanic activity. From these primary sources the brilliant stones have then eroded by wind and water and distributed to other areas or secondary sources.

Depending on the depth and locations at which these diamond deposites occur mining techniques to extract them range from hard rock mining to open-pit mining to placer mining to marine mining or artisinal mining.

We were invited by Siddhant’s dad to visit his workshop to view these raw beauties being fashioned into exotic shapes and then embedded along with other gorgeous gemstones into exclusive and exquisite gold jewelry. (Which we were not allowed to photograph – sigh – non-disclosure and secrecy stuff!)

I was overwhelmed at the spectacular leap in diamond production in the last 20 years or so thanks to Israeli computer technology now used to cut and polish the raw diamonds of even the most minuscule sizes with minimum wastage.

Gone are the days when an elite group of ‘babus’ gifted with an intuitive sense of depth perception and magic fingers which no technology can out do would shape raw diamonds ensuring to keep in mind carat, cut, clarity and colour so that the final stone would fetch the best price.

As we entered the workshop I felt we had walked into a science fiction laboratory equipped with a line-up of computers and other humming machines with laser beams operated by rows and rows of hushed and intensely focused men at work.