Essay: Visibility Is Mistaken for Values

📝Model Essay

There is an old story about a king who asked every family in his kingdom to pour one cup of milk into a big tank in the palace courtyard at night. It was meant to be an offering for the good of the kingdom. One villager thought, "So many people will pour milk. Who will notice if I pour a little water?" He did exactly that and went home happy. The next morning, the king came to see the tank. It was full, but full of water. Everyone in the kingdom had thought the same thing.

The villagers were not bad people. They simply believed that what no one sees does not matter. And that is the problem this essay is about. Today, we often judge people and institutions by what they show, not by what they are. Someone who posts a photo while feeding the poor is called kind. A government that announces a big scheme is called caring. But showing and being are two different things. Values are what we hold on to when nobody is looking. Visibility is what we do when somebody is. When we start treating the second as proof of the first, we fall into the same trap as the villagers. Let us look at how this plays out in different areas of life.

This habit is not new. In ancient India, big sacrifices like the Ashvamedha slowly turned into a show of a king’s power, and that is partly why the Buddha and Mahavira asked people to focus on how they lived rather than on rituals. Kautilya, who understood people well, warned that an officer may look honest and still steal, which is why he suggested secretly testing their honesty. Much later, in 1877, the British organised the grand Delhi Durbar while a terrible famine was killing millions of Indians. Compare this with Gandhi on 15 August 1947. While Delhi was celebrating, he was in Calcutta, trying to stop Hindus and Muslims from killing each other. The man most linked with India’s freedom chose to stay away from the celebration because his work was elsewhere.

What has changed today is how easy it has become to show off. With a phone in every hand, almost anything can be turned into content. We post about donating blood, planting a tree, visiting an old-age home. There is nothing wrong in sharing good work, but many of us have started doing things in order to post them. A popular saying online goes, "Pics or it didn’t happen." Young people feel this pressure the most. When likes and followers become a measure of self-worth, it is easy to feel empty and anxious, because the approval of others never feels enough.

Society also rewards show over substance. In many villages, women are elected as sarpanch, but their husbands attend meetings and take decisions, so much so that people call them "Sarpanch Pati." On paper, women are represented. In reality, they are not. Weddings are judged by how grand they were, and dowry continues in the name of status. At the same time, the people who truly keep society running, like mothers doing unpaid housework or sanitation workers cleaning our streets, are hardly noticed.

Politics and government are where this matters the most. Leaders are often remembered for statues, renamed cities and big inaugurations rather than for quiet reforms. Dr. Ambedkar had warned that worshipping leaders in politics is dangerous for democracy. In government, success is often measured by numbers that look good in reports, such as how many toilets were built or how many accounts were opened, instead of whether people actually use them. The Minimum Support Price is announced every year with great attention, yet the Shanta Kumar Committee found that only a small share of farmers actually benefit from government procurement. Many honest officers work quietly and are rarely noticed, while those who are good at publicity get ahead. We forget that the civil services were built on the idea of anonymity, working for the public without seeking credit.

The business world has its own version of this. Satyam was one of India’s most admired IT companies until 2009, when its founder admitted that the accounts had been faked for years. Volkswagen advertised its "clean diesel" cars until the 2015 scandal showed that the company had cheated on emissions tests. Today, many companies call themselves green or socially responsible, but for some, it is more about advertising than action.

The same gap shows up in how we treat nature. Tree plantation drives get big coverage, with officials posing with saplings, but very few people go back to check how many of those saplings survived. Disaster management is a good example of how real work often stays invisible. When a cyclone does not kill people, there is no headline. After the 1999 Super Cyclone killed nearly ten thousand people, Odisha quietly built cyclone shelters, trained volunteers and set up a disaster management authority. When Cyclones Phailin and Fani came in 2013 and 2019, the loss of life was far lower. The world praised Odisha, but the real work had been done slowly, over many years, away from cameras.

Countries behave in similar ways. World leaders meet, shake hands, smile for photographs and sign big declarations, but many promises are forgotten later. Rich countries promised one hundred billion dollars a year by 2020 to help poorer countries fight climate change, but did not meet that target on time. On the other hand, when India sent vaccines to other countries during the pandemic, or rescue teams to Turkey after the 2023 earthquake, it was visible help that came from a real belief in treating the world as one family.

In the end, this is a question of ethics. The Greek philosopher Plato told the story of a man named Gyges who found a ring that made him invisible, and once no one could see him, he started doing wrong. Plato’s question to us is simple: would you still be good if nobody could ever see you? The Bhagavad Gita gives a similar lesson through nishkama karma, which asks us to do the right thing without thinking about reward or praise. A value that disappears when the audience leaves was never really a value.

At the same time, we should not be unfair to visibility. Some things need to be seen. The Right to Information and social audits help people check whether the government is actually doing its job. Gandhi’s Salt March was a very public act, but it was built on deep values. For people who have been ignored for centuries, being seen and heard is often the first step towards justice. So the problem is not visibility itself. The problem begins when showing off takes the place of actually doing good.

What can we do about it? Governments can judge schemes by how much they change people’s lives, not by how good the reports look. Offices and institutions can learn to notice and reward people who do honest work quietly. Parents and teachers can remind children that character matters more than marks or trophies. And each of us can be a little more careful about what we admire online.

Let us go back to the king’s tank one last time. The water in it was not the fault of one villager. It was the result of a whole kingdom believing that what is hidden does not count. A country is made of millions of such small, unseen choices. If each of us pours milk even when no one is watching, the tank will fill on its own, and it will be full for real, not just for show.