New Delhi, April 26 -- Every morning, Sampada Joshi unlocks her laptop by typing a wish. "Using aspirational sequences like 'Paris#2026' or 'Senior@Manager' as passwords is my way of manifesting and tricking the brain into focus before the inbox takes over," the 31-year-old, Bengaluru-based category manager says of her ritual.

In the pre-internet era, passwords used to be simple watchwords. As the internet exploded in the 2000s, it became a timeline of our lives. For a Bengaluru-based marketing leader, Prateek Kole, 38, early codes were guarded by his crush's name. Sanskriti Verma, 27, a content creator from Gurugram, effectively froze her adolescence in text fields through Selena Gomez-themed logins. "Far from being random data, a passw...