Twenty five years ago, Keshav asked me to watch Dil Chahta Hai. It is a recommendation that sticks out vividly even today because that buddy who grew up abroad didn’t watch Hindi movies — to the extent that he believed that Adam Sandler was a bigger deal than Shah Rukh Khan. (Imagine.) Yet here Keshav was, prescribing a Bollywood film to fill a bunked day of college. “That’s just it,” he said, selling it with the pitch that mattered to him most. “It’s almost like an English film.”
It was. It felt fresh and stylish and easy, in a way we weren’t used to. For those in our twenties when the film came out, Dil Chahta Hai remains a trigger. The thump of that bass-line. Three friends heading to Goa. An abruptly ended phone call. A wicked nickname. A feebly concealed crush. A convertible slicing through sunlight. That this film — available to rent on Apple TV — has turned 25 this week feels faintly impossible. Not (only) because we remain in denial about our advancing years, but because it bottled a version of youth that continues, somehow, to feel current.
When a 27 year old Farhan Akhtar wrote and directed this debut feature in 2001, our movies were weighed down by melodrama and high stakes. Families were sprawling and oversized, emotions were even larger, and friendship was something that mostly happened on the side, even as the plot got on with romance and sacrifice. As with its landmark production design, Dil Chahta Hai rearranged the furniture.
Akash, Sameer and Sid tripped over it. They ribbed each other, finished each other’s thoughts, laughed at jokes nobody else would understand, nursed grievances for far too long. These men were so devoted to each other that they disguised their love as relentless mockery. This wasn’t the on-screen “yaari” of blood oaths and blaring background music. These young men could argue until 3 am, laugh about it by breakfast, wound each other deeply, but still show up for the friendship.
The performances are perfectly pitched. Aamir Khan’s Akash has the cool facade, and also the carefully defended vulnerability. We can see the exact moment his armour cracks. Saif Ali Khan makes Sameer’s romantic bewilderment funny as well as desperately felt. Akshaye Khanna gives Sid a quiet intensity that still startles.
Inevitably, each falls in love. Sid falls for the elegant older woman, taking on the ridicule of judgmental friends but staying sincere. Sameer, perpetually chasing some woman, stumbles through the arranged marriage process — the very setup his generation rejects the most — to discover how genuine connection can bloom inside convention. Akash, all cynicism and wisecracks, is convinced that he’s immune to love, and thus gets blindsided by it. The film lets these men, individually, negotiate the gap between what is expected of them and what is inevitable, and it does so without moralising. The heart wants what it wants.
Their romances feel even truer in comparison to those that the film rejects. There is a suitor called Subodh, a soft boy given to the grand gesture, who commemorates each anniversary and sub-anniversary, underlining his love with red balloons. The film mocks this superficiality the loudest. In the other corner stands Rohit, the parentally approved brat who feels entitled to the girl. The film literally throws a punch at this old-school (old-film) thinking. Dimple Kapadia’s Tara, Preity Zinta’s Shalini and Sonali Kulkarni’s Pooja are never, ever reduced to prizes. They have opinions, tempers, and the right to walk away.
Dil Chahta Hai made modernity look effortless. Ravi K Chandran’s cinematography bathes everything in clean, summery light. The apartments feel lived-in rather than designed. The wall colours are striking and contemporary without trying too hard. The frames exhale into expansive wides, giving each protagonist enough elbow room to squabble and horse around but also to capture their solitude when brokenheartedly stabbing a salad, or sitting on a pillow butthurt from romantic misadventure. This was not the overdone cola-advertisement cool of “young” films. This felt like the real thing. Dil Chahta Hai changed the temperature.
Seen today, some of the film’s attitudes reveal their vintage. Certain gender dynamics and cultural assumptions feel of their time, and the privilege of those particular boys is more visible now. Yet the emotional architecture holds. Friendship is not a static monument, but a living and changing thing that must survive distance, ego, heartbreak and the gradual accumulation of adult responsibilities. When we watch that film today, we know what the characters don’t: that the ‘Goa version of us’ will not last forever, and that friendships which survive its loss are worth keeping. (I’ll text Keshav this evening.)
Dil Chahta Hai was never about the way we were. The leads were too unencumbered, their clothes too good (how I envied Saif’s graphic t-shirts), and their banter too perfect. We may have had the Goa and borrowed the Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy soundtrack, but they had the convertible. They were the aspiration. Not the youth we had, but an advertisement for the youth we wanted. What we feel, now, is not nostalgia but craving. The heart wants what it wants — and sometimes it wants to celebrate a 25-year milestone for a film that doesn’t get old. There’s nothing wrong with that. Dil Chahta Hai taught us to go anywhere for free cake.
Raja Sen is a critic, screenwriter and columnist. His first play, a murder mystery called The Simla Affair, recently opened in Delhi. He is currently writing a horror film.
Streaming Tip Of The Week:
Twenty years older than Dil Chahta Hai—and 20 times as good—is Sai Paranjpye’s Chashme Buddoor, another comedy about three young men flailing around together. The masterpiece is streaming on Amazon Prime and JioHotstar.