“All time is unredeemable”, Eliot tells us.

And yet, it is but the nature of humankind to look back constantly, trying forever to understand that elusive point where its past held a tryst with its destiny. We like to tell ourselves that history is best understood in retrospection, and in the process, end up rewriting it over and over again. Sometimes, though, the act of looking back is nothing more than casual indulgence – nostalgia, especially for a generation you never belonged to, can after all be wonderfully cathartic.

 However, when we, at Third Lane, decided to do a bit of retrograde introspection of our own, we decided to be more honest. We decided to pick a decade we thought we “connected with, the most.” It is only when we went down the annals of the all-seeing internet that we realized that we were not the only ones. It seemed that almost the entire country, indeed, the entire world, connected emphatically with the 90s. It is everyone’s favourite decade – spawning hashtags to listicles to long-winded analyses with equal fervor. What is it, we wonder, that makes it such an iconic decade – not just in our country, but throughout the world? At the brink of the 90s, the western worlds were at their peak of prosperity and glamour, producing everything from sitcoms to cellphones at an almost arrogant pace. At the same time, there were deep ideological shifts taking place – with the Berlin wall taking down with it the dream of a utopia, and the Cold War coming to a final, definitive end.

 This surreal coexistence of giddy optimism and bleak politics was felt on our homeground as well. In India, the 1990s began with an assassination and ended with a war. A bloody birth and a bloody demise – and in between, ten tumultuous years. The economy opening up to the world, the advent of international brands, a complete metamorphosis of the world of entertainment – changes that left a lasting mark in the cultural landscape of the nation. It was the decade of indie pop, of Aishwarya Rai, and Sachin Tendulkar, of A.R. Rahman and Pepsi. But it was also a decade of extreme political violence, from the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the insurgency of Kashmir, to the Bombay blasts and the riots it provoked. It was, indeed, the best of times and the worst of times, a decade of blood and glitter.

 It seems universally accepted that the 90s changed the world as we know it. Today, as history crumbles around us one more time, as we grapple with the loss of the familiar, and the way forward seems darkly uncertain, it seemed comforting to us to look back once more at the ultimate hurrah of the last century. We like to call ourselves the “90s kids” in tandem with anyone else on social media who can. But perhaps the worst scandal in this characterization is, as John Updike said, – we do not know that we were a generation.

During our course of research, we have found many stories that have been written, rewritten and covered better than we ever could. Surprisingly, however, we have still managed to find things that remain largely under-documented. Third Lane brings you the 90s – one more time – in a collection of vignettes that explore this incessantly relevant decade from a number of different perspectives.