MTV India VJs who became style and cultural icons. (From left, seated: Malaika Arora, Cyrus Broacha, Maria Goretti, Shenaz Treasury, Mini Mathur, (standing) Cyrus Sahukar, with former MTV producers Seher Bedi and Preeta Sukhtankar

After four decades of shaping youth culture and late night channel surfing, MTV is finally turning down the volume. But while MTV channels abroad — its parent, Paramount Global, announced on Oct 12 that MTV Music, MTV 80s, MTV 90s, Club MTV and MTV Live will go off air by the year-end — prepare for their swan song, MTV India remains alive. The catch? Here, the music died a while ago, somewhere between the last CD shop and the first streaming app.

What it left behind was a tribe of OG video jockeys (VJs) who defined pop TV and then outlived it.

Nearly four decades later, the faces that once invented what it meant to be young, loud and slightly ridiculous on Indian television — Cyrus Broacha, Cyrus Sahukar, Shenaz Treasury, Nikhil Chinapa, Malaika Arora, Maria Goretti, Mini Mathur, and others — have regrouped for an encore.

There’s a reason for that. The nostalgia had never really left. Every time a former VJ posts an old clip, comments flood in. “If you grew up in the ’90s, we were part of your life,” says Cyrus Sahukar. That shared history still binds the old gang.

“Everyone’s in touch and hangs out quite a bit. It feels like home,” says Shenaz.

The old MTV crew have remained unusually close now that ‘home’ has a new address: Instagram. Under the banner of Bratpack Studios, the collective they launched in Aug 2024, they’re doing what they’ve always done best — talking, laughing, oversharing, and making everyday life look cool.

The studio serves up weekly drops of music, travel, food and laughter but, more than anything, the nostalgia of everything they once stood for.

Back then, each VJ was a one-person brand before influencer culture even had a name. Its hosts introduced not just songs but a new way to talk, dress and laugh. While Doordarshan gave you discipline and family values, MTV gave you Cyrus Broacha in a short skirt and heels who got himself waxed for a Women’s Day gag.

For Nikhil Chinapa, the architecture graduate who won the VJ Hunt, MTV was never just a channel but an awakening. “I’ve met people from small towns who watched MTV and realized there was a world outside their world.”

One was rapper Raftaar, whose mother pointed at Chinapa on TV and said, “He’s from South India, too, so you can do it.”

“I’m not saying I’m the reason Raftaar became Raftaar,” he grins, “but that’s the kind of permission MTV gave.”

That sense of possibility was infectious. “There was a guy called Vishal from Bihar who stole cable TV from a neighbour’s house to watch MTV and later became its executive producer.”

To Chinapa, that was MTV’s real legacy. “It became an accidental torchbearer for empowerment. Through shows like Roadies, MTV spoke about gender equality, same-sex acceptance, even abuse within families but never in a preachy way.”

Shenaz, the bubbly boho face of MTV Most Wanted, still remembers how it began. A St Xavier’s student, she was spotted through an ad audition.

“I auditioned for Club MTV... Malaika got that, and I became her stylist, and also Broacha’s,” she recalls.

Within months, she had an offer from Singapore Airlines, but her boss convinced her to stay: “He said, ‘Either you see the world or the world sees you’.”

That spontaneity defined the era — a brief, unselfconscious decade. “Most Wanted didn’t have a director telling us what to do. I just did my own thing... I used to shoot 10 shows a day.”

That DIY energy served as training for the creator economy she works in now. “I learned filmmaking through MTV... producing, editing, everything,” she says.

Broacha — MTV’s original prankster — was the accidental VJ, a theatre kid who nearly joined Channel V in Hong Kong before MTV offered him a reason to stay home.

“In 1996, MTV wanted regular guys. The others were models, too good-looking, strange accents... I looked like a boy with no hope... so I represented a lot of boys with no hope,” he laughs.

Looking back, he shrugs with affection. “Fourteen years at that damn channel, getting paid nothing; of course, it shaped me. Being MTV VJ was a badge of honour. I’m embarrassed to admit it because it’s such a vacuous profession, but for a little while, you turned heads. People treated you with a lot of unnecessary respect.”

Sahukar, barely 18 when he won the VJ Hunt, brought satire to MTV’s scriptless comedy. His Fully Faltoo spoofs like Semi Girebaal — a parody of ‘Rendezvous With Simi Garewal’ — famously outrated its source material. “Can you believe that? It actually did better.”

Could they get away with that kind of humour today? “Dude, I’d be thrashed. I don’t think Simi was too happy with it either,” he concedes. “But back then, people didn’t have an opinion on everything. Outrage existed, but it didn’t have an audience. It was freer. You could be silly without overthinking.”

Broacha agrees. “Before 26/11, we had no problem being on the road dressed as cops, doing almost violent capers. We did end up in the lock-up, explaining we were just doing a silly show and then let off without much noise,” he says about shooting MTV Bakra, India’s first reality show based on candid camera pranks.

That mix of madness and camaraderie became MTV’s signature. “It was egalitarian... There was no star system,” says Broacha.

Sahukar agrees. “It was a golden time. No one cared about algorithms or likes. It was about doing things that were fun and stupid and hoping others found it funny, too.”

That was before the music faded, and the idea of a “music television” dissolved into the endless noise of non-music content.

“MTV became everything except music,” says Shenaz. “And lost its niche in 2003–2005, when they decided, ‘let’s just go mass and do reality TV...’ then it became like every other channel and stopped being cool.”

After MTV, the gang scattered but never really left the spotlight. Chinapa built India’s EDM scene from scratch, Shenaz became an actor and travel vlogger, Mini turned producer and anchor, Malaika a style and fitness icon, Maria a chef and cookbook author, Sahukar an actor and show host, and Broacha, keeps tickling funny bones like no one else can.

Could MTV ever be rebooted? “It would have to be run by the youth again,” says Sahukar. “You can’t have older people deciding what young people want to watch,” Broacha feels. “It could have become some sort of influencer-run OTT platform... but we’re the ‘Last of the Mohicans’.”

And yet, as Sahukar points out, MTV’s DNA never really disappeared, it just moved online. “You could cut what MTV did for 10 years into reels and you’d have a full-fledged network. But you’d still need to build culture. Because that’s what it really was. Pop culture.”