Comprehending Akash Malhotra from Dil Chahta Hai

“It’s hard to improve on perfection” Akash Malhotra, Dil Chahta Hai

“Dad, there is more to life than signing cheques” Akash replies on being asked about his future plans in life.

This is a subtle hint at the way Akash perceives his life. He does not want to spend his life in monotony, what’s exactly the way he wants to spend his life, well that remains a mystery to Akash himself, but he is sure about the way he does not want to spend his life. There is no patience or any sort of love for any form of art, anything which does not result in boredom can be counted totally under Akash’s territory.   

Dil Chahta Hai is film that have significantly influenced a whole new generation of film makers and gave Indian audience a glimpse of what a cool film in an urbanized Indian context looks like, but more importantly for me, it gave me one of my favorites fictional character from Hindi Cinema, Akash Malhotra.

I sincerely believe that Akash is a narcissistic, caustic, rude at times, attention seeker, and have a whole lot of other human flaws, yet he appears a cool guy, and wants to be at the center of each scene. All the signs clearly display that Akash has a narcissistic personality; his superficial charm, attention seeking nature, manipulating people for his own amusement, he is not a good listener, he would listen about the issues that his friends are facing, be quick to evaluate a person or a situation they are in, and very smartly infuse a solution totally opposite to the one they actually need. For the better part of the film, we see him carry that smug on his face that he is better than anyone else, and has his life sorted.     

Of course, without an iota of a doubt in my mind that Sid is far more popular, better, well written character than Akash, who actually wins our heart with his restraint sadness and maturity in terms of understanding of the notion of love, whereas Sameer is the amusing one who discovers the meaning of love through his own individual process. Akash goes through a same pathway of discovering love which he mocks at the early stages of the film, he is just not invested in the idea of emotional bonding that love stands for, he wants his own space, and expects his partner (temporary one) to respect that space. On being asked what he looks into a person before getting into a relationship, he casually but very confidently replies “Someone who lives her life and lets me live mine” He is confident of his charming skills, and never misses an opportunity to brag about his ‘Magic’. He also carries the concept of masculinity being thrown to make sure things go according to a man (Perhaps I am overlooking into this aspect, but it does represent an important characteristic of Akash not convinced with the idea of love).

Take the initial scene, where Sid calls Akash and Sameer in the middle of night to check what he has drawn, instead of discussing the portrait, Sid’s inspiration behind the work, Akash swerves the attention of the scene towards the rendezvous he had with their economics teacher, Miss Kashyap, because apparently, he had private tuition's with her. Another instance, where he is standing at the Sid’s art exhibition, he looks totally disinterested, and honestly, he is, simply there with his presence for his friend, otherwise he has no time and patience to understand Sid’s art. 

He is there for his friends, yet it feels that he wants it to be all about him.

The important issue is not necessarily Akash not believing in love, its him rejecting everyone else’s love. Be it Sid’s or Sameer’s or even Shalini’s at one point, he wants to everyone around him to believe how easily he predicts relationships outcomes with his fundamental decision of not being involved emotionally with someone. To some extent he is correct and put forward a rational approach where we cannot argue with him and let him win the argument, like Shalini does, for the time being.

Hedonism is a subject of philosophy that is based on an individual’s goal to seek in pleasure in any form throughout their life. People who are considered to hedonist in their nature strive on maximizing the moments of pleasure in their life, and simultaneously minimizing any sort of pain. I would like to believe that for the majority of the film, Akash was acting as one, the pleasure he was seeking in various throughout his life, be it food, or as a matter of fact, sex (there is subtle mention of this when he tells Sameer that is how things began for him also, referring to Sid’s involvement with an older lady, who Akash assumes is a great way to start one’s sexual activities with an experienced partner), road trip to Goa, adventurous rides in Sydney. There is pattern in the film, where we see Akash eating for the majority of the times among all the other characters, and if you see the way he eats his food, there is a sign that signifies his hunger, both literally and metaphorically, his hunger for attention, for people around him to be constantly mesmerized by him, he even mentions at a certain point while having lunch with Shalini in Sydney that he is starving, that not merely symbolizes his quest for food, but also for attention, that he needs someone to be around him and listen to his “cool” facts in life and let his ego be massaged. Since, the two friends he had been spending most of his time around are no longer there, and he is certainly not going to ask Mr. Satayadev ‘Steve’ Mehta to have lunch with him. Akash, at this point of the film knows or cares mostly about maximizing the pleasures in his life.  

   

There are many aspects in the film where basically the camera tells the mental state of Akash, the giant couch he sits around with his friends watching an action film, he is in a normal state of mind, relaxing and having a great afternoon with his friends, we can directly see his face. Post the confrontation with Sid, we see a side view of Akash sitting in the car, next morning when Sameer goes to his house we see him sitting on his giant couch, oddly in a restrained way as the background is blasted with Sting’s popular track ‘Desert Rose’ we again see Akash through a side view, the story of Akash’s life is further well documented in the song ‘Tanhaiyee’ where I observed more side view shots of Akash, my inexplicable hypothesis behind the Side view shots of Akash, when he is going through some sort of emotional turmoil can be more precisely explained as the reason we see him majority of the times in Side view during the song and the mentioned situations is to signify that there are two different sides of him, one which is forcing him to face his egoistic, self-absorbed nature and trying to make him realize his mistakes on the all the situations that led to that point, the other side which we do not see is the one which is not accepting the wrong attitude that leads him to those situation, not giving a time of thought to understand what love actually feels and what it means to be in love, for the other person, and trying to drive him again in the quest of pleasures. The scene when Akash returns from Australia, we see his face emerge out of darkness, and be visible alongside the sunshine. Another spontaneous sign that the darkness of loneliness he has been going through might now be turned into a ray of hope that he desperately needs.. He talks to his dad in a confined space of his bed, because this is what he is actually going through internally, he doesn’t talk to him while sitting on his giant couch, from where he regularly communicates with his friends, he is isolated and curbed by the loneliness of his love. The first shot is again a side view shot from a distance, it is established that Akash is not emotionally in a right frame of mind and throughout the conversation we do not see Akash talk face to face with his dad, up until a certain point.

I wonder what exact moment the transformation of Akash starts? we are made to believe that it was during the opera sequence of the epic story of Troilus and Cressida, that he realized his love for Shalini, where he gets under a trans like state and finally locates that one face among the crowd for which he would die thousand times but how can a man with very little amount of sensitivity get a change of heart out of the blue. He is same man who is told twice that love cannot be rational and cannot be contained around the boxes of logic and practicality by two of the most important people in his life, and yet at those two particular moments, he had simply derided that belief. So how can we can come to this conclusion that a tragedy written centuries ago, can bring a dramatic change of heart. Recall the scene post the opera when Shalini asks Akash that has hasn’t yet told her whom he saw when he closed his eyes, Akash in his usual avatar replies with a smirk that how can she be so sure that he saw someone, Shalini counter-strikes that because for the first since she met Akash, he is talking less and thinking more. We observe Akash become more and more intense in his behavior, they way he talks, the way he gazes at Shalini, this change of behavior can solely be attributed to the fact that he might have realized his love for Shalini, but still not ready to accept the fact that he is failed in his own ideology of emotionally not getting attached with a person, now how does he muster up the courage to defeat that side of his personality that gave birth to this ideology inside his mind. He grows restless day by day, walking alongside his loneliness, around the graveyard where one can sense the restlessness, chaos building up inside him ready to explode at given point of time, and when he subconsciously calls Sid, and asks for Sameer, he breaks down into tears. Finally coming into the terms with his flaws and remembering each and every word of Sid during the conflict about the idea of love.  

So, despite Akash not being the ideal guy with all the human flaws to which he is not aware of till a certain point, what makes him an intriguing and captivating character (at least for me), because he seems cool (although Sid was actually the coolest of the three), because it was his journey which was coming of age in its own way, because he realized his flaws, accepted them and shared his feelings for Shalini and apologized to Sid for his mistake. When Akash apologizes to Sid, he throws another witty line “It’s hard to improve perfection” which gives me a ambiguous idea that post the end of the story, it would be difficult to separate the self-righteousness out of Akash’s nature, and people around him have to accept that nature till a certain degree of its own limitations. Akash has a lot of qualities which can make you despise him, but there is a firm genuineness with which he comes across as a guy who understands love alone and discover his blunders, all by himself.