Beyond Survival: UPSC Essay Aspirant’s Guide to “Truth Knows No Colour”
At first glance, most UPSC Essay aspirants looking for quick, directly applicable guidance to learn how to write the essay might feel that the first part of the series on “Truth knows no colour” offered a very long runway for a take-off that never happened. But that was intentional. My aim was never to hand over a ready-made template to you; it was to construct a profound philosophical groundwork.
I deliberately avoided the standard route of citing social bias, historical distortions, or moral anecdotes. Instead, I turned to foundational scientific principles to craft a uniquely fresh perspective, one designed to stimulate original thinking and anchor UPSC Essay aspirants in a philosophically solid and intellectually rigorous grounding. Through the analogy of the unseen electron and the perceived colour, we explored the paradoxical nature of truth and perception itself. The purpose of this unconventional approach was to build a conceptual framework capable of decoding the true demand of the essay prompt. By encapsulating the tension between objective reality and subjective experience, I sought to reveal how the human evolutionary interface lies at the heart of this paradox – in the distinction between Usefulness for survival and Truthfulness as an absolute, objective reality.
That first episode, therefore, serves as the foundational chapter of a much larger argument. It does not merely employ an analogy; it reveals a root-cause analysis of prejudices and attempts to think from first principles, rooting socio-ethical reasoning in the fundamental laws of Physics and Biology. The ambition is intellectually rigorous but also liberating: to expose the evolutionary roots of all bias.
The UPSC demands not memorisation or superficial writing, but nuance and discernment. My pedagogical approach is therefore not to provide ready-made templates but to cultivate way of thinking – the ability to build multi-layered, original arguments rooted in clarity; to build your tolerance for ambiguity and successfully navigate paradoxical prompts in the UPSC Essay Paper.
Yet there is a danger here. The UPSC Essay aspirant who grasps the depth of this philosophy may lose strategic balance by spending too much time exploring the “what” and “why” but too little applying the “how.” This series, therefore, is designed in three stages: the first and the second stages establishes the ‘what’ and ‘why’ philosophical foundation; the third will provide the bridging signposts and structural strategies for the “how” in expression of the essay. The aim is to merge insight with execution, so that wisdom translates into coherent and structured expression in your writing.
Truth, like the electron, is an independent, fundamental reality that exists beyond our perception – a truth without colour, real but unseen. Colour, like perception, is a useful, subjective illusion created by our biology for survival – a perception without objective truth, vivid but not independently real. This tension between what is real and what is perceived serves as the philosophical engine of the essay.
In Part 1, we concluded, that our perception is not a window to reality but a functional interface shaped by evolution. To understand why we see the world through colours of bias, prejudice, and division, one must trace the conflict within the human condition itself – that lies in the eternal tension between Usefulness and Truthfulness.
Evolution gave us Usefulness but civilisational progress demands Truthfulness. For millions of years, evolution’s only goal was survival, preservation and continuity of our species. Our brains were not designed to perceive objective, absolute truth; they were designed to make quick, effective decisions that ensured preservation and continuity. This is the triumph of Usefulness – the instinctive, survival-driven habit of classification and distinction, the very act of “colouring” reality into simplified categories that ensured cohesion through cohort building and safety. A coloured world is evolution’s shortcut for efficiency. Truthfulness, however, is the conscious act of transcending those shortcuts – the pursuit of objectivity, impartiality, and universality, whether through Science or Ethics. The law of gravity and the principle that all humans deserve dignity are both colourless truths. The long arc of civilisation is humanity’s attempt to transcend evolutionary bias through ethics, philosophy, science, law – all instruments created to align ourselves with Truthfulness over Usefulness.
The social consequences of remaining trapped in the evolutionary mode and inheritance are vast. When human societies operate primarily on what is useful to dominant groups, they institutionalise discrimination, subjugation, and marginalisation. Every major form of historical injustice stems from the betrayal of truth at the altar of usefulness.
The Betrayal of Humanity in the Usefulness of Caste System was a veil of useful mechanism for maintaining hierarchy and predictability. It stabilised order for millennia but did so by institutionalising a falsehood – that human beings are inherently unequal. This narrative was useful to those in the helm of social hierarchy and power, but it was a violent betrayal of the colourless truth of human dignity and universality.
The Brutality of Humanity in the Usefulness of Colonialism justified economic exploitation and ruthless political domination under the mask of a civilising mission. This fiction coloured entire populations as backward and inferior while disguising imperial greed as moral duty.
The Necrosis of Humanity in the Usefulness of Patriarchy organised society efficiently for male control through gender disempowerment. It was useful for preserving the power structure but fatally corrosive to civilisation itself. It coloured half of humanity with limitation and dependency, eroding vitality from within – a moral necrosis at the heart of human progress.
Thus, the colour of Usefulness becomes the most sophisticated instrument of oppression. It hides exploitation behind rational order. Civilisation, therefore, is the deliberate, conscious re-balancing of this evolutionary bias – a collective striving to bridge the gap between perception and truth, between instinct and conscience.
This movement from survival to self-awareness has never been automatic or without sacrifices. It has always required rare individuals who possessed moral conviction, courage, and intellectual clarity to challenge our evolutionary inheritance and fight against the gravitational pull of Usefulness and led humanity toward Truthfulness.
Gautama Buddha defined inner awakening, with the Three marks of Existence – Anicca (impermanence), Dukkha (suffering or dissatisfaction), and Anatta (no-self) and leading the path of enlightenment of ultimate truth through Nirvana.
Dr. B. R. Ambedkar used the colourless language of law and rights to construct India’s greatest tool for truth – the Constitution.
Mahatma Gandhi weaponised Truthfulness itself through Satyagraha (truth force), Ahimsa (non-violence), and Sarvodaya (universal upliftment) believing that moral conviction grounded in colourless truth will expose the fallibility of the Imperial colonialism on our road to freedom and justice.
Swami Vivekananda, with his emphasis on the potential divinity of the soul inspired ethics of compassion and service, reverberating the colourless Truth in his statement – “So long as the millions live in hunger and ignorance; I hold every man a traitor who, having been educated at their expense, pays not the least heed to them”
These great lives are not anecdotes just to be venerated, but for you the UPSC Essay aspirant to inhabit their ethical imagination as civilisational bridges, as evidences that the course of human progress is the ongoing attempt to discipline Usefulness under Truthfulness.
This is why the scientific analogies – the electron, the biology of colour, the Uncertainty Principle – are so vital. They provide undeniable and universal anchors. They remind us that truth is independent of perception and that perception is useful but not absolute.
But you, the UPSC Essay aspirant, are not expected to write about electrons and Chlorophyll – but to think from the foundational principles that these scientific truths illuminate so powerfully. These examples are not meant to be directly copied into essays; they are meant to arm your mind with philosophical clarity. The aspirant must think, not merely write, from first principles.
From this insight emerges the universal lens of Usefulness vs Truthfulness where every issue of prejudice and discrimination like caste, gender inequality even corruption – can be reframed through this dichotomy by asking, “Which part of the issue is driven by a coloured, ‘useful’ narrative, and which part aligns with a colourless, ‘truthful’ principle? This question not merely rhetorical, becomes an intellectual compass that allows you the UPSC aspirant to navigate complex topics in depth, with originality, precision and philosophical integrity.
This is the foundation of civilisational ethics – to recognise that every socio-political & cultural prejudice, every bias, every ideology, and every hierarchy is downstream from the limitations of our evolved perception. Humanity’s virtue is not to condemn the colours of prejudice and bias as sin but to transcend it through impartial understanding and rationality to the colourless truth.
At its deepest level, an interesting observation of this argument becomes a rebuttal to the evolutionary antithesis of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam.” The ideal – that the world is one family, is a principle of Truthfulness, born of civilisational awareness. But evolution itself operates on the opposite rule: “Mama Kutumbakam” – “My family”. For most of human history, survival depended on the ruthless logic of the small circles of myself, my family, my kin, my tribe, my community and so on. Here remember that the instinct is bounded even when the ideal is boundless. We can conceive of universal brotherhood but act on parochial allegiance. The result is that poverty, exclusion, marginalisation and conflict are not mere technical failures but moral ones – the failure to live by our own colourless ideals of truth.
Even our allegiance to “truths” through technologies, ideologies, political systems often remains contingent on their usefulness. When new paradigms arise, old truths are discarded just as the Stone Age did not end because there were no stones left or the blind man’s stick loses value once vision returns. To live by usefulness is to see the world through the tool; to live by truthfulness is to see the tool itself. This is the moment of intellectual awakening, when the instrument of perception becomes the object of reflection.
Language is the most insidious repository of this bias that I call the Trojan Horse of evolution. It delivers pre-packaged judgments into consciousness. Words such as pest, slum, refugee, or servant carry moral codes within them, shaping instinctual action before thinking. The harmless grasshopper becomes locust a pest when it threatens harvests, where ‘pest’ suggests immediate remedial action of eradication on which humanity has scaled economies on pesticides. Our linguistic semantics only carry the shadow of usefulness. To liberate thought, we must reclaim language itself.
Here I will reinforce again that civilisational progress is gained not by abolishing bias and prejudices but by creating technologies of correction through instruments that institutionalise colourless truthfulness. The Constitution, science, and ethics are all such technologies. The Constitution enforces equality procedurally; science disciplines belief through falsification by structurally defining the laws of nature; ethics demands reasons where instinct seeks comfort. Each is a deliberate rebellion against our evolutionary defaults.
Yet hypocrisy persists, for the distance between truth as ideal and colour as instinctual is vast. Remember the French Revolution, proclaiming Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, announced the colourless truth of universal rights but applied them selectively to serve the French national usefulness that justified the enslavement and exploitation of their African colonies. The same hypocrisy underpinned in caste systems practicing exclusion even as it brutally violated its own spiritual philosophy of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” that preached divine unity.
Now to reconcile this staggering cognitive dissonance, in every age and era humanity has repeatedly created “useful fictions” so powerful that they can blind entire nations and generations to their own hypocrisy only to justify its betrayals of the truth.
I believe that by now you have understood the colours of prejudice, bias, discrimination, violence, and corruption are not simply in the system; they are the system – we have inherited that evolution has woven into our biological and cultural design either as mental shortcuts under the guile, in the guise of usefulness so pervasive in our world.
By now you know that colour exists not in the world but in our mind only as a useful illusion crafted by evolution. Truth, colourless and impartial, lies beyond our lenses and neural renderings. Thus you the UPSC Essay aspirant’s moral and intellectual task here is to perceive that truth despite instinct, to live by it despite pressure, and to express it in thought, word, and deed. To write with truthfulness is to think as a civilisational being – one who sees beyond survival, beyond bias, and beyond usefulness itself.