2001 was a good year to be young. Primarily, because you were young and there is no downside to being young. None whatsoever. In any era. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.But 2001 was a particularly good time to be young, alive and upwardly mobile in India. A decade of economic reforms and liberalisation had done its work. Your parents were better off — and that meant you were better off. When I say ‘you’, I obviously mean a young, urban person of relative privilege. And the reason I am putting that caveat in is because it is 2026 and I don’t want the internet to cancel me. Therefore, I am acknowledging and apologising for my privilege right up front. In 2001, I wouldn’t have had to because we had just about started taking baby steps to entitlement. We wouldn’t even know what that word meant then, because it was all very new. Being self-involved was a luxury that was a first for our generation. We were just about beginning to experience that, and there wasn’t that much privilege to be embarrassed about. We enjoyed the self-involvement and left the self-awareness for younger millennials and Gen Z to discover, wallow in and apologise for. This was a generation just finding out that, unlike our parents, we could afford to sweat the small stuff. The first in our bloodline, as they say on social media platforms now.And then came Dil Chahta Hai, which fit perfectly into this bubble. Akash, Sameer and Sid drove us straight into Goa and into a world which reflected our concerns. DCH arrived right as India was opening up to the world, and instead of a state-of-the-nation film, it gave us three boys negotiating their journey to manhood and well…Goa. DCH gave us the crises money can afford, and growing pains that were not about scarcity and survival. A coming-of-age drama neatly rooted in consumerism. A film about characters always dressed for Instagram with no Instagram in sight.There was no searing existential angst; it was a celebration and contemplation of youth, friendship and growing up largely within the same social construct and class — no one had sent it the memo on diversity. But while DCH functioned in a self-contained world, it wasn’t a superficial or shallow one. It spoke in a limited lingo, but one that was authentic to the audience it spoke to. The affluence was in the backdrop; the main character energy belonged to the universal themes of friendship, love, loss, and reconciliation. All of it served up with zero melodrama or leering villains (Give or take Ayub Khan hamming it up as Shalini’s overbearing fiancé).Think of it almost as a Jane Austen novel. Austen’s world was five families and one parish. DCH’s was three boys and their circle. Neither let the outside in, and neither needed to. Both worked within a tightly-knit, almost sealed social construct. Austen proved you could stay inside a drawing room and still nail irony, social commentary, humour, love, heartbreak and friendship. DCH proved you could stay inside a Bandra flat, a Goa beach house, fit in a detour to Sydney and do exactly the same.The film, which released in the same year as Lagaan, Gadar-Ek Prem Katha and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, was not a pan-India hit and worked primarily in urban centres. Without ever spelling it out, DCH showed you a country that was changing, and that the one-size-fits-all brand of cinema would have to reinvent. It was not a film designed to show you the larger picture but somehow did just that. Twenty-five years down the line, Dil Chahta Hai remains the definitive Bollywood film on youth. Gen Z is irreverent and inventive, but is keeping that creative energy for reels and memes. Younger millennials spent far too much time calling everything out as problematic — and took the fun out of most things. In that event, it is but fitting that a 25-year-old Gen X film is still doing all the heavy lifting on being young.
