Q4 · UPSC Civil Services Mains 2023 · Essay · 125 marks · 1 min read

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Inspiration for creativity springs from the effort to look for the magical in the mundane.

Topic: Philosophical and ethical quotes. Syllabus: Philosophical and ethical quotes Same official PYQ from year-wise 2023 and Philosophical and ethical quotes.

Essay map

Opening scene

Anecdote

A mid-day meal cook adjusts the grain by eye because the weigh-scale is broken. A visitor calls it ‘jugaad’. A child later writes a play about the cook. The magic was not a lightning bolt. It was looking at the mundane until it spoke.

Keep this in every paragraph

One stand

Creativity is a way of seeing the given world — a formula, a folk tune, a bus route — until a new use appears. Write against the cult of the isolated genius, and still admit that looking needs time the exhausted may not have.

Use once, in a scene — do not dump names

Quotes to earn

  • Tagore

    The world is not a machine — the mundane is already thick if we look.

  • Ramanujan

    Notebooks that found pattern in what others called ordinary numbers — one earned scene.

Turn each heading into a full paragraph in the hall

Heading map

What the line is asking

  • Mundane: kitchen, file, monsoon, a village path, a spreadsheet.
  • Magical: pattern, metaphor, a cheaper fix, a kinder rule.
  • Effort: attention is labour.

Self and art

  • Tagore: the world is not a machine; the ordinary is already thick.
  • A phone photograph of a drain can be art or noise — the effort decides.

Science

  • Penicillin’s mould; Ramanujan’s notebooks; a PHC compounder reading a label (cousin of the doubter).
  • Peg: ISRO’s ordinary clean-rooms producing an extraordinary window.

State

  • UPI: payments as ordinary as a message — magic that sat in mundane small transfers.
  • A collector who walks the ration shop sees what the dashboard dyes.

Economy

  • Repair, craft, a circular stall: value hiding in what we call waste.

The counter

Do not tell the overworked that their exhaustion is a failure to ‘see magic’. Some mundane is injustice (an open sewer). Creativity here is a tap, not a poem. The line is about attention, not about blessing the broken.

Drop one peg where it fits — not a data dump

Value addition

  • UPI A magical rail built on mundane small payments.
  • MDM / ICDS The school kitchen as a site of unnoticed design — and of rights.
  • Repair / circularity Value in what a throwaway economy calls waste.

Last 8–10 lines in the exam

Last paragraph

  • Close: look twice at the queue. That is how a republic invents. Expand — this is only the map.

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