Before algorithms curated our taste and before reels trained our thumbs to scroll endlessly, there was MTV — the millennial gateway to coolness. For many of us who grew up in late-90s and early-2000s India, MTV wasn’t just a music channel. It was a handshake with adolescence, a cultural rite of passage that shaped the way we dressed, spoke, joked and listened.

It was not the charming Surabhi or the vintage Chitrahaar, the Doordarshan shows we would watch if allowed with family but a wholly different breed of irreverent content.

Looking back now, I appreciate it more for the gem it was. Content, songs, musicians... After a few years, there was Channel [V] too to choose from and it did give us Viva, the all-girl pop band. To this day, I hum the songs and remember the whole journey the girls went on, and we fans with them.

But I am digressing. This is about MTV, and brought on by reports about the closure of five MTV music channels in the UK by end-December, which in turn triggered a flurry of conjecture about the fate of MTV India.

MTV India was the first time we heard the word VJ and we saw them on telly — a completely different style of “presenters”. There was the cool dude Nikhil Chinapa, the bubbly girl-next-door Shenaz Treasurywala, the chief prankster Cyrus Broacha. There was Malaika Arora, every boy’s crush and every girl’s fashion inspiration. They burst onto the scene, and once I got home from school, MTV opened another door to education — one that did not match the parents’ or even older siblings’ style of viewing.

It was hipster, before anyone knew what that was; it was young, it was cool.

MTV Select, Most Wanted, Bakra... you name it, I watched it.

The format spoke; it was spontaneous and conversational, almost as if dadas and didis were chatting and showing you the world. But what has stayed most with me, and my closest friends, is the music they helped reach a wider audience. Especially IndiPop.

To today’s teens and YAs as they are called, it might seem like the Stone Age or something — no Spotify, no YouTube and obviously, no Internet. Did we miss out? Absolutely not. We knew everything there was to know about the lyrics; the models who featured in the music videos. To this day, it was such a novelty to see, identify and recall models and celebrities in a music video. And then, of course, there were the artistes behind the creations.

There was Palash Sen and his Euphoria crew, there was Colonial Cousins, the jugalbandi of Hariharan and Leslee Lewis, there were the Bombay Vikings and Silk Route, and individual artistes like Shubha Mudgal, Falguni Pathak and so many more.

I still listen to the songs — at house parties, while cleaning up clutter in the room, on the way to work. That is the power MTV had; it shaped the taste of a generation so much so that even decades later, these musicians pull us back into our teenage selves. To a time that was simple, unencumbered by the daily rise and fall of duties and emotions.

Pop culture is a catchword these days, and MTV is part of pop culture, our pop culture. There are now Instagram and Facebook reels of the music videos we would watch on TV. Engage with one and you know it will be a steady stream, pun intended, of nostalgia wrapped in an invisible music cassette. Allowed an inch of throwback, we take a mile of happiness.

So much so, when Euphoria came to Calcutta a few years ago, I made sure I had a ticket to the show. Well past the appointed hour when the Palash Sen-led group came on stage, in their now-ubiquitous bandbaaja get-up, everyone in the restobar sang along to each and every song, and reminisced about the time we heard them first.

Around the time I passed school, MTV morphed into more of a reality show channel. I followed the first season of Roadies, discovered Rannvijay Singha for life. But soon the charm wore off. Or I grew up.

But early MTV was something else. At the risk of sounding like a parrot, we enjoyed curated music at designated times of the day against the infinite scroll through today’s algorithmic feeds; the much-loved VJs are to this day cultural icons with whom we shared pop moments and not the dime-a-dozen content creators on every social media platform competing for increasingly fragmented attention spans of today... And I could go on and on.

So long, MTV! You did not just show us music, you showed us who we were going to become.