Q3 · UPSC Civil Services Mains 2025 · Essay · 125 marks · 2 min read

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Thought finds a world and creates one also.

Topic: Philosophical and ethical quotes. Syllabus: Philosophical and ethical quotes Same official PYQ from year-wise 2025 and Philosophical and ethical quotes.

Essay map

Opening scene

Anecdote

A surveyor in the 1950s walks a ridge and “finds” a village that was always there. A planner in 2025 draws a smart-city boundary and “creates” a world of who is inside the map. Same human faculty: thought. The line asks you to hold both — discovery and making — without collapsing into relativism.

Turn each heading into a full paragraph in the hall

Heading map

Two movements of thought

  • Finds: Kepler, Ramanujan, a farmer reading clouds — the world answers.
  • Creates: language, money, caste rules, nation, app — we inhabit what we named.
  • Stake: wisdom is knowing which is which.

Quote to earn: Kant — we meet the world already structured by categories. Tagore — “the world is not a machine”; imagination is also truth-seeking. Amartya Sen — identities we make can wound or widen.

Knowledge and science

  • Hypothesis finds; instrument creates a new visible (telescope, CRISPR).
  • Fact peg: ISRO’s missions did not invent Mars; they created a capacity and a public story of India in space.

Social worlds we create

  • Money is a thought that became a world (Keynes: animal spirits; also trust).
  • Caste is a created world that pretends to be found in nature — Ambedkar’s labour is to unmake it.
  • Constitution: a created world that finds dignity already in the person.

Politics and media

  • A speech can find a grievance and create a mob.
  • Census categories find people and create vote-banks.

Digital

  • Algorithms create a feed-world; they do not find “the” public.
  • Deepfakes: creation that impersonates finding.

Counter

Gravity does not negotiate. Hunger is not a narrative. The essay fails if “creates” becomes “anything goes”. Creation is responsible when it answers to what was found.

Drop one peg where it fits — not a data dump

Value addition

  • Kant The mind does not only photograph; it structures experience — useful if applied, not dumped.
  • Ambedkar Caste is a social creation with the force of a found “nature”; annihilation is unmaking a world.
  • Constitution 1950 A created legal world that claims to find equal persons — still a project.
  • UPI A created payments world on public rails; it found a habit of small transfers and scaled it.

Last 8–10 lines in the exam

Last paragraph

  • Close: think as a trustee — find carefully, create accountably. A civil servant’s notification creates a world for the poor; it must still find their actual queue. Expand; do not stop at this map.

Quick related

Students also ask

  • Best lessons are learnt through bitter experiences.

    Next question in the 2025 paper (Q4). View answer →

  • Full essay?

    No. In the hall, give one “found” example and one “created” example in each dimension.

  • Risk?

    Do not slide into “truth is whatever we invent”. Keep a stubborn outer world.

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More from this paper

Q1 · UPSC Mains 2025 · Essay · 125 marks

Truth knows no color.

Philosophical and ethical quotes

Not a full essay — a map. Open with a dyed fact. Stand: truth has no tribe; hearing still does. Headings: self, society, state, world, then one counter. Earn Gandhi and Ambedkar once each. Peg NFHS-5 or RTI, not a data dump. Close on constitutional morality.

Q4 · UPSC Mains 2025 · Essay · 125 marks

Best lessons are learnt through bitter experiences.

Philosophical and ethical quotes

Guidance only. Scene: a first failure in office. Stake: bitterness teaches only when interpreted. Body: self, COVID/disasters, history, ethics. Gandhi’s experiments; Sen against famine-as-fate. Counter: some pain only wounds. Close on protocols.

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