Dil Chahta Hai  billed as Do Your Thing in English, although the title literally means The Heart Desires) is a 2001 Bollywood movie. It was directed by Farhan Akhtar and was a hit in cities in India and overseas. Those who liked it said it broke new ground by showing Indian youth as they are today.

All the characters are upper-class and cosmopolitan. They live in lavish houses, wear designer clothes, attend art exhibitions and performances of Western opera, and travel overseas as a matter of course. They even go on dates — a Western practice which is considered scandalous by most Indians. Some critics say that this is why the film did not do well in the villages; the lifestyle depicted was just too foreign.

City sophisticates, however, appreciated the style of the film as well as its setting. One song sequence recapitulates Bollywood dance history; one song drops the usual dance accompaniment and establishes the character’s state of mind through lyrics and a moody photo collage. There is an extended opera sequence and a song-and-dance inside a painting. The director is tweaking Bollywood conventions in a knowing way.

The film’s style extended to the music, by Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy. Many film fans thought that the music was fresh and different.

Story line

The movie tells the story of three friends graduating from college and facing life as adults.

Each character has a different outlook towards life, and love in particular:

* Akash (played by Aamir Khan) does not believe in love and says that one should never keep a girlfriend for more than two weeks.
* Sameer (played by Saif Ali Khan) is genial, well-meaning, desperately romantic and confused. He is prone to romantic infatuations; each time, he is sure that this time he has found true love.
* Siddharth, or Sid, (played by Akshaye Khanna} is a painter. He is the most serious of them all; dedicated to his work and not interested in trivial romances.

Akash is not only a cad in his personal life (breaking hearts, proposing to a girl named Shalini in jest), but a mischief-maker in his friends’ lives. He engineers a breakup between Sameer and Sameer’s girlfriend, then proposes a vacation trip to the beaches of Goa.

Sameer, predictably, falls in “love” in Goa, with a pretty Swiss girl, a story that ends in disaster. He returns home to find that his parents have arranged a meeting with a potential marriage prospect. He resists as he doesn’t want an arranged marriage, but the instant he sees the girl, he decides that she is the one. Unfortunately, she already has a boyfriend. Sameer has to hide his unrequited love and content himself with her friendship.

Sid, in the meantime, is falling in love too. A lovely older woman, a divorcee, has moved next door. Sid befriends her, then finds that he can’t help loving this utterly unsuitable person. Everything goes wrong. Akash’s offensive remarks about this relationship create a major dent in the friendship and Sid and Akash refuse to talk to each other. Sid’s mother is horrified. Tara hears that Sid has quarrelled with friends and family because of her and feeling that she has ruined his life, refuses to see him.

Akash is also experiencing romantic upheaval. His parents send him to Sydney, to work in the family business. On the flight to Sydney, he meets Shalini again. She has no reason to trust or like him, but after they run into each other repeatedly, they both start to feel a certain “something.” She presses him to tell her how he feels; he refuses. She then declares that she is returning to India to marry. Akash lets her go, then realizes that he can’t live without her.

All three chums have fallen in love and all of them have — so far — been unlucky in love. Is there a happy Bollywood ending? For two of the characters, yes. For one, no. However, in the last scene of the movie, it is suggested that even the heart-broken character has met someone who will heal his wounds.