OTP: One-Time Person?

Time of India

06-05-2025

Santosh Desai is a leading ad professional. He says he has strayed into writing entirely by accident, and for this he is "grateful". "City City Bang Bang" looks at contemporary Indian society from an everyday vantage point. It covers issues big and small, tends where possible to avoid judgmental positions, and tries instead to understand what makes things the way they are. The desire to look at things with innocent doubt helps in the emergence of fresh perspectives and hopefully, of clarity of a new kind. LESS ... MORE
Nothing is more urgent than an OTP. It can arrive unbidden at any time, and regardless of whether you're in the middle of a presentation explaining why you haven't met your annual target or on a hot date with someone special, you have to stop what you're doing and answer the call of nature, as it were.
For OTPs are the new natural. No door opens without them, and life comes to a standstill if one is not prompt in responding, sometimes within seconds, lest it expire.
There was a time when being oneself was a matter of presence. You showed up, and that was enough. A familiar voice, a shared memory, a face remembered in good faith—these were once sufficient proof of identity. Today, none of that quite suffices. Instead, we await a six-digit code, dispatched by a distant system, valid for 30 seconds.
The OTP is our passport to ourselves. Its great advantage is that it does not depend on memory, already overburdened with passwords that stand in for personhood. It allows us to pay, log in, and access what is already ours. It hovers somewhere between a key and a ritual—without it, nothing moves. Its authority is absolute, its presence fleeting. The irony is poetic: something so temporary now stands as the final arbiter of permanence.
Never before has the act of being oneself required such relentless reaffirmation. Aadhar, PAN card, passport, driver's licence, voter ID—our bureaucratic lives have long been strewn with identity proofs. But these were used occasionally, ceremonially. They also connoted a kind of stability. Your Aadhar number was yours to hold and to cherish. The OTP, however, inserts itself into the everyday. It is the heartbeat of a system that no longer trusts memory, continuity, or human judgement.
Technology has altered the nature of identity. It has made it transactional, procedural, and external. The self is no longer a given; it must be retrieved. The simple declaration—I am me—no longer holds weight. It must be accompanied by a ping and a password, a fingerprint or a face scan—a code that proves you are not an impostor in your own skin.
The only way we can exist today is by encrypting the self, converting it into electronic gobbledegook. Our identity must be locked in a vault, accessed only through codes, passwords, and biometric tokens. We cannot remain in our natural state; we must be reborn in digital terms—a version that bears no resemblance to who we are, only to what we can be verified as. This is safety, yes—but it is also a kind of exile.
The real power of the OTP lies in its elegant refusal to rely on memory—human or machine. It bypasses both recall and storage, offering instead a live sliver of certainty, generated in the now. It doesn't ask us to remember or depend on the cloud to recall who we are. Instead, it creates a brief moment of clarity—valid only once, seen only by us, and then gone.
There is a strange intimacy in this transaction, however impersonal the mechanism. The OTP arrives unannounced, asks nothing but recognition, and disappears without a trace. In a world obsessed with permanence and tracking, its vanishing act feels oddly personal.
In this sense, the OTP is more than a tool—it is a philosophy of control. It belongs to a world that cannot tolerate ambiguity, that sees every access point as a potential breach. The idea of identity theft adds emotional weight to what is essentially administrative. We no longer fear being misrepresented—we fear being locked out. Not of our devices, but of ourselves.
We are moving toward a world where even memory isn't enough. Our pasts live not in recollection but in databases. Facial recognition systems remember us better than we do. Our location history knows our path more reliably than our own minds. The self is increasingly outsourced—stored in the cloud, backed up by tokens and timestamps.
And yet, for all its precision, the OTP is fragile. It expires. It mistimes. It fails to arrive. It inserts a pause between intent and execution. In that fleeting moment of waiting, something peculiar happens: a modern form of vulnerability. We are locked out, not because we've forgotten who we are, but because the system doesn't remember. At the end of the day, the OTP is not a way of identifying us, but the device that has become our surrogate self.
And perhaps, the story of the OTP is only beginning. As every other marker of identity—face, voice, fingerprint, behaviour—becomes replicable, as deepfakes and the relentless march of AI blur the idea of the authentic, OTP may emerge as the last bastion of truth. Ironically, its power lies in the fact that it cannot be stored, reused, or faked. It is a ghost that proves you're alive—just for a moment.
In the end, it may not be the permanence of data but the evanescence of a code that secures us. A fleeting flicker that says: this is me, now. Not always. Just now. And that may be the only kind of truth we can trust.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.