SECTION A
Essay
125 marks
Thought finds a world and creates one also.
WRITE IN
90 min
1,000–1,200 words
Reading the topic
The topic says thought both discovers the world as it is and creates new worlds that did not exist. Science finds laws already present in nature, while ideas like democracy, rights or a digital payment system build new social realities. The examiner expects the essay to show both functions and how discovery and creation feed each other.
ThesisHuman thought is both a lens that reveals reality and a tool that remakes it, and progress comes when ideas grounded in discovery are used responsibly to create.
Dimensions to cover
- 1Science: thought finds the world when theory uncovers hidden laws such as heliocentrism or evolution
- 2Philosophy: thinkers have argued that the mind actively shapes how we experience reality, not just passively records it
- 3Society: ideas like equality and caste annihilation have created new social orders by changing what people consider normal
- 4Polity: a constitution is thought turned into a framework that reshapes power, rights and identity
- 5Technology: innovations conceived as ideas become infrastructure that changes daily behaviour for millions
- 6Ethics: thought can also create harmful worlds, as ideologies of racial superiority showed, so creation needs moral responsibility
Counter-view
- Materialists argue that economic and physical conditions shape thought more than thought shapes the world. The essay should accept that ideas arise from conditions, but show through examples that ideas then gain the power to transform those very conditions
Open and close
- Open: Open with a street vendor in Varanasi scanning a QR code for a ten-rupee chai, a transaction that existed only as an engineer's idea a few years earlier
- Close: Conclude that because thought creates worlds as surely as it finds them, every thinker bears responsibility for the world their ideas will build
Where marks usually go
- Covering only one half, either discovery or creation, and missing the 'also' in the topic
- Writing an abstract philosophy essay without concrete scientific and social examples
- Treating thought as always positive and ignoring destructive ideologies
Examples that fit
- HistoryDarwin's theory of natural selection revealed how species change over time, a case of thought finding a world that had always existed.On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin
- ThinkerAmbedkar's undelivered speech argued that caste must be destroyed at its religious roots, an idea that later shaped constitutional guarantees against untouchability.Annihilation of Caste (1936), B. R. Ambedkar; Constitution of India, Article 17
- ThinkerKant argued that the mind contributes categories like space, time and causality to experience, so thought partly constructs the world we perceive.Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant
- CaseThe Unified Payments Interface, launched in 2016, began as a design idea for interoperable payments and has created a new everyday economy of instant digital transactions.National Payments Corporation of India, UPI product page