Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara turns 15: How Spain became the ultimate rich-person quarter-life crisis cure

If you didn't make plans to traipse across Spain after Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara in 2011 with your college friends, then what exactly was the point of watching the film?

But truly. ZNMD sold us the dream of a lifetime: Pack a suitcase neatly, like Hrithik Roshan's workaholic Arjun, or throw everything in like Farhan Akhtar's Imran, and head off to Spain with your squad of three.

And all props to Zoya Akhtar for making us believe in the glamour of Seville, Costa Brava and every other impossibly beautiful Spanish location that you only see on Instagram reels these days. Well, surely, somewhere between luxurious hotels, the Tomatina festival, making life-changing promises while being chased by bulls and road-tripping in open-top cars, you are bound to find yourself, and perhaps the meaning of life too, while unwinding with ‘I’m a rock hard chick, in a rock-hard w-w-world.’ (Kalki Koechlin’s Natasha was fun, I would have loved to do a road trip with her. Why was she a problem again?)

Need to finally apologise to your friend whose girlfriend you stole, in college? You’ll solve it in Spain and probably write a poem about it too. Imran and Arjun’s friendship has suffered deep fractures since college, and while most of us wouldn’t go for a trip abroad with such complicated emotions, both of them were daring enough to do so.  Of course, a woman is at the centre of it all.

Imran’s apologetic, but not enough, and Arjun throws him a line that you wouldn’t expect from a London-based workaholic who really looks as if he breaths stocks: Don’t apologise until you’ve felt it from the heart. Imran learns the meaning of an apology towards the end of the film, after he finally meets his biological father who abandoned him at birth. Cheers to Naseeruddin Shah in a fabulous cameo.

Nevertheless, Imran reconciles and accepts the truth about his parenthood, and the meaning of friendship.

Naturally, the next logical step is to go skydiving across Spain to cement the friendship.

And then, if you need to stop being a workaholic and also address your suffocating fear of water, make sure you find a soft manic-pixie-ish like lifeguard who will take you to the depths of the sea and calm you down while you flail. (Hats off to Katrina Kaif’s Laila to calming down a panicking Arjun, I would’ve signed my will underwater then and there).

And finally, the problem that…needn’t have been a problem at all. If you ever need to get out of an engagement that you never really planned for, a bachelor trip too, is the way to go. In the film, Abhay Deol’s Kabir accidentally gets engaged to Natasha: He was just showing her a ring for his mother as one does, and she mistakenly assumes its for him, and woe is you, it’s too embarrassing to not be engaged, so Kabir…is engaged.

So, yes, ZNMD boys were rich enough to sort out their quarter-life crisis in Spain, while the rest of us might just stop at Carrefour and buy Baskin Robbins, if we're feeling particularly rich that day.

Eh, who’s the real winner now? (Still them).