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Time of India
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time of India
The Failure of Failure?
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 Failure, today, is not allowed to die its natural death. It must be rehabilitated, repackaged, and recycled—turned into grit, grace, or growth. It is no longer a terminus but a threshold. The fall is not the end of the story, only the second act. Fail better. Fail forward. Fail fast. But by all means, fail usefully. We tell ourselves we are being more open, more real. We celebrate vulnerability—as long as it is accompanied by hindsight. We speak of rejection, loss, collapse—but only once we have emerged intact, triumphant even, with a lesson to teach. The shame of failure is permitted, but only briefly and only as narrative bait. There are many costumes we dress failure in. The most flattering is redemption. The stumble that made us stronger. The heartbreak that made us wiser. The bankruptcy that taught us discipline. All is forgiven, as long as it leads somewhere better. This is LinkedIn failure at its best, a pose worn by the successful to increase engagement, to say, Once I was a loser like the rest of you, but fear not; you too can be redeemed if I could be. Statistically speaking, It is an inclusive lie, but it serves its purpose. Then there's the tragic-but-noble failure. The one born of principle, conviction, or timing. The artist who never sold, the idealist who died unknown, and the fighter who was undone by the world, not by their own missteps. This version dignifies failure—but it also aestheticises it. It is curated suffering. It leaves the soul intact. It makes us suffer on their account, to feel righteous from a distance, having no skin in the game. It gives us some succour to know that our failures may exist despite our being geniuses. In our mind at least. Look at van Gogh. And when neither nobility nor redemption is available, we default to utility. Failure becomes feedback. A prototype. A data point. No time to feel, just iterate. The modern world is full of people who kept trying, or to use the language of the start-up, pivoting till something clicked and they made podcasts about it. The overblown narrative that surrounds failure today is based on truth. People do redeem themselves, failure does teach lessons that success can come nowhere near, it builds resilience and humility and can makes us better not just in terms of material progress but as people. The problem perhaps is that this narrative is purely instrumental – it thinks of failure as a means to an end, burying the fact that there can be another kind of failure. The one we don't know how to name. The failure that simply hurts. The kind that exposes you—not as a misunderstood genius or a courageous risk-taker, but as someone who misjudged themselves. The kind that brings not growth, but shame. Not insight, but silence. The kind of failure that makes you smaller, and not in a good way. Smaller, because you thought you could. And you couldn't. This failure doesn't want to be posted about. It doesn't want to be learnt from. It doesn't want to teach you anything. It just wants to exist—to be carried, not converted. We often say that younger generations lack the mental equipment to deal with failure. That Gen Z, in particular, is fragile, thin-skinned, over-therapised. That they crumble under pressure and overshare their wounds. But we, the older cohort, are hardly models of grace either. We pride ourselves on coping, on never making a fuss. But our inability to accept failure is just as deep—only better disguised. We don't collapse; we deflect. We don't feel; we reframe. We have grown up believing that failure must always be private, always provisional, always recoverable. What we cannot bear is the idea that we may have been wrong about ourselves—that we aimed for something and missed, not because the world was cruel, but because we weren't enough. The truth is, all of us are not built for greatness. A lot of us will lead ordinary lives, reaching destinations no one tells inspiring stories about. The sense of failure is often a product of unrealistic goals, something our culture is loath to admit is a real thing. We speak the language of stoicism, but we are terrified of consequence. We cannot stand the thought that some things break and stay broken. That shame is not always a dysfunction. That some failures are just failures. But maybe we need a place for that again. A place where not all pain needs to be processed. Where not all scars are signs of strength. Where we can fail—and not redeem, not repurpose, not post—but simply live with the weight of it. Because failure, in its rawest form, teaches us nothing. It just tells the truth. And that, perhaps, is enough. Or should be. The modern tendency to take all that is hard and bitter and turn into a wellness potion of some kind serves to disconnect us from the idea of pain. Adversity takes on an unrecognisable shape with well-meaning language crowding out all exits. It is important to recognise that we will have wounds, carry scars, grapple with our own failings. As people we wear skins over skins – layers grown not from growth but from the act of being. From enduring, not transforming. And that should mean something. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Time of India
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
OTP: One-Time Person?
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. Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
