Kali Yuga (kali-yuga)

The Kali Yuga is the fourth and darkest age, when dharma stands on a single leg and people are short-lived, quarrelsome and ruled by appetite. The Mahabharata dates its beginning to the moment Krishna leaves the world, thirty six years after the war, and the Pandavas set out for the mountains precisely because they will not live in it. The epic is narrated to listeners already inside this age, which is why so much of it reads as instruction rather than entertainment.