The Don't Be Shy trailer launch ran nearly two hours behind schedule on Thursday evening at a five-star hotel in Mumbai, and the whole thing wrapped inside half an hour once it finally got going. Nobody in the room seemed to mind much by the end of it, because Alia Bhatt showed up with a story that made the wait worth it.

The hotel had been dressed up like a college fest, gola and candy floss stalls included, for a film that leans into campus energy. But the news wasn't the decor. It was Alia Bhatt sitting there as producer, not lead, alongside Prime Video's Nikhil Madhok, director Sreeti Mukerji and her sister and co-producer Shaheen Bhatt.

"Fourteen years ago, I made my debut as an actor. And fourteen years later, I am today introducing four new actors and a debutant director," Alia said, adding that she felt more nervous than the newcomers she was launching. That would be Aarushi Bajaj, Piyush Khati, Bianca Arora and Ansh Duggal, all first-timers who joined the panel once the trailer had played.

Asked whether she'd been tempted to act in the film herself, Alia said the thought never crossed her mind. "I love being an actor and being in front of the camera. But being a producer has another sort of fulfilment," she said, walking through how the project came together after Mukerji pitched the idea to her and Shaheen. Building it out took two years, she said, before the material went to Amazon on a Friday and Nikhil Madhok messaged back the next morning wanting to talk.

The Parle-G line

The host had the panel define Gen Z slang, ragebait, aura farming, brainrot, breadcrumbing, side quest, the works, and that's what set Alia off. "Ragebait was what Shaheen used to do to me as a kid," she said. "She used to say to me that I came free with Parle-G. Like I was not really my mom's and my dad's, and that I came free with Parle-G. So that was Shaheen ragebaiting me when I was 4."

It landed exactly the way it was meant to, as the kind of sibling jab every Indian household recognises, and it gave the evening its most quoted line by a distance.

Don't Be Shy streams on Prime Video from September 25, with Alia and Shaheen Bhatt producing under a banner that's now betting entirely on new faces in front of the camera. Whether that gamble pays off is the actual question hanging over the release, trailer buzz aside.