20 years of ‘Dil Chahta Hai’

'Dil Chahta Hai' captured the zeitgeist of a post-liberalization generation. As long as its three well-to-do heroes could cruise along the old Goa highway in a convertible, they were following their bliss. It was uncomplicated. (Image: Screen grab)

Musketeering and hanging out were such 2001 vibes. In 2001, I was 27. We wasted a lot of time then, dreaming up Nirvana Live and trips to unspoilt Goa. “Computer businesses” were booming. The Internet did precious little for us—it was mostly a professional tool for important emails.

From 2021’s social isolation limbo, say it loud: 2001, ah the utopia of you!

We were just about getting used to ‘Friends’ streaming through our cable TV wires when Bollywood manifested its own frat boy musketeering with Dil Chahta Hai. Its three man-boy protagonists were marinated in global-urban R&R more than Chandler, Joey and Ross were.

The sitcom had subversive West Village; the film had partly gentrified Juhu. The West Village gang hung at Central Perk; the Bombay boys wore shiny faux-rexine pants and flailed to Farah Khan’s choreography at night clubs—they took wealth for granted. The ‘Friends’ boys were more 21st century versions of yuppies; they had jobs and were aspirational consumers. The Dil Chahta Hai boys didn’t have much aspiration. They were immersed in themselves and their bromance: Akash Malhotra (Aamir Khan), narcissistic scion of an industrialist family, had the luxury of shifting to the family business’s Sydney outpost to nurse a heartbreak; Sid Sinha, a moody painter who hardly sold any paintings but had enough artistic space and time to build a steady oeuvre; Sameer Mulchandani (Saif Ali Khan, newly reincarnated and reintroduced), a full-time, gullible, catastrophic Casanova who never had a workplace but enough dough to glow up on short notice and party.  And 27-year-old Farhan Akhtar, born and raised in Bollywood aristocracy, who created them and debut-directed the film.

Also read: 20 years of 'Dil Chahta Hai': An ode to real friendships

Dil Chahta Hai wasn’t experimental in plot or structure. The climax, when Akash, love-cured of narcissism and momentarily transformed into a Devdas, gate-crashes the wedding of the orphaned girl he loves to declare his love for her, the 1990s return roaringly back. Yet Dil Chahta Hai was novel—“Hum Hain Naye, Andaaz Kyon Ho Purana”, as the party anthem from the film’s album (by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy) went. An urban generation, seasoned in MTV and cable TV, that was transitioning to another century, had found a Bollywood film that mirrored some of its feels and trappings.

Unlike a majority of millennials, who are sure-footed in their pursuit of goals—at least according to most consumer demography studies of the last decade—Akash, Sid and Sameer were directionless. “Have you thought about your life?” Sameer’s father asks him (one of many all-too-familiar dialogues in the film) villainously, as most Indian industrialist fathers on screen are wont to do. When Sameer replies “No”, he doesn’t have remorse; he's only a bit annoyed. As long as they could cruise along the old Goa highway in a convertible, the stodgy Nokia phone and Sony Viao in tow, they were following their bliss. It was uncomplicated.

For the first time in mainstream Bollywood, the wealthy hero without any major good-versus-evil conflicts to fight and win, or any heroine to fight for, was a starting and end point to a story—a story unapologetically by, about and for a distinctly globalised city sensibility. It was a film that mirrored the aspiration for what its title song called "chamkeele din" - or the shiny India that we hoped for, during the economic recession immediately following the late '90s.

Love was among equals—equals in economic class and liberal thinking, not age. Sid fell for a woman much older than he, played by Dimple Kapadia, and it fuelled conflict in the story, but not in the way a 1990s’ love story—or any love story before the '90s—did. Love was not difficult because the hero or heroine had to bridge a social class, but entirely because of emotional baggage. This was a cinematic scheme outside the scope of portraying have-nots of any kind and Akhtar got this milieu beguilingly right. When, in the end, we saw the three characters—two with the women they seemingly got the happily-ever-after with and the artist in search of another muse—do a Goa away from the beach and in a green expanse, we were convinced that this seriocomic romance-cum-bromance was a barometer for an era in which chilling was aspirational. Perhaps we are back to that aspiration again—in an entirely different context.

I recently watched Dil Chata Hai on Netflix again after 2001. The nostalgia worked in many ways. But the reason the film has aged well is because Akhtar could delicately hold a pulse that defines an age group in India that is neither strictly youth nor strictly mature adult. Their generational conflicts can still resonate with today’s India, and that tells us how much remains unchanged in India’s familial and social fabric no matter how comfortable we get with our wealth.

Also read: 'As a new class emerged post-1991, they needed new heroes to look up to, to validate them and justify their consumerism': Kaveree Bamzai