It has happened, the Kali Yuga has arrived and as the doors to damnation swung open, out came all of us, the dreaded millennials. We were out of the womb and onto our smartphones, our fingers sticky with placenta and our spirits hungry for the sublime.

I know there’s a technical term for it: generation x,y,z or whatever, but for slightly perverse (and self indulgent) purposes I have always liked to call mine the de-generation; the generation that came out in the twilight hours and stepped straight into a cesspool of LED light and isolation.

See, I grew up in a post-globalization Bangalore that changed faster than a little-singing-to-herself-while-peeing-on-her-below-the-bottom-long-hair girl could keep up with. I had the good fortune of growing up to stories of cycling down an old rain tree laden road in search of the fairy princess in the strawberry frock and of playing to the ghosts in devil’s park while sharing a smoke with the cops. I later grew into these massively different stories of cyber sex subverts, suicide bombers and mass shooters with easy access to the dark web, and it all happened very fast. With this tsunami of change brought on by money, power, wars and that sonuvabitch time who always gets you by the neck hairs, our worlds are inherently different, the ways that we live and love are different and (yes, here he is again) the very quality of time has changed, but why do we feel like this is a bad thing?

Maybe it’s because our smartphone lives lack the romance of a simpler time, and yeah, they do. Love letters and pressed flowers are basically relics, I mean, all that shit is charming but the intensity of these times, here and now, lives in the immediacy of our in-your-face-every-second existences. We are flooded with information, us illiterate dumbasses, whether we like it or not, it’s sold to us everywhere and then implanted in our clothes, our skin, our hair. We are sped up, dirty fingernails and runny noses, and amidst all this late-night-laptop-glare we are searching for something, for the sublime?

Immanuel Kant came up with this whole philosophy of the sublime concept ages ago. The sublime, when it was first ever mentioned in literature referred to nature, the awe-inspiring height of mountains and the divine state of forests. That which was so magnificent that it was at the same time terrifying. As times changed the sublime changed. Soon it became about mathematics, space, numbers and expanses too enormous to even comprehend; all pointing towards the infinite, all pointing towards something so much larger than ourselves that our lives are inherently laid at the feet of it, whatever it is. So of course, at one point it was all about the gods and then not too long after became about war, guns and mushroom clouds. Today, it’s been thrown on its head, rung out and spun around a few hundred times, because today it’s malleable, mysterious and alive in everything, capable of taking any form. It has become like a quick acting virus, moulding itself to screw us over the best it can, and of course, awe us at the same time. So here we all are, trying to find it, define it and shape it, before it burns us to the ground.

I was never particularly proud that I wiggled my way out when I did, not until recently when I felt this sudden surge of pride through my tiny, ’93 born body. It happened when I bought some new pants and finally unclenched my uptight butt cheeks just enough to understand and embrace what my generation all shares in common, or at least what I would like to think that we do. I think that we all share a common understanding of the time we live in, of the boil-your-skin-off intensity of it and of it’s verging on some sort of free for all/free fall sublime. In turn, our search for it, for this sublime, is faster paced than ever before, as we try to rule the world/save the world/annihilate the world and establish our own sublime, a self proclaimed sublime. As we detail the urgency of our quest in 140 characters, and in these same 140 characters search for other voices that will lead us closer to this supreme state, or just for those that will lead us closer. We spend far more time on social media than we do reading books or the newspaper and so we see and interpret our world entirely differently than the generation before us, we traded in the old eyes for the jet, set and go version and this means that we go for that which gets us going. We’re powering off of this, off of instinct and honesty, us uninformed ignoramuses, we’re back to square one, to heart strings or whatever, we’ve come full circle.

This is us, debased slime oozing out of yesterday, our eyes are peeled wide open, we are claiming our pre-apocalypse time. Today, we completely reject our past parallels and are drawing new lines because we are soaking wet and racing to a bright white light, somewhere, yet to be determined. This is a whole new romance, glazed eyes, lonely lives and Kalki breathing down your neck. Here we are fetal and fatal at the same time, ready to blow it all away.