Neha Dhupia has an answer for why she is still on Roadies after 21 years, and it isn't the one you'd expect from someone who joined a youth show without being the target demographic.

"I know I have an authentic voice and I don't want to pretend to be this other person," she said, at an event built around how Gen-Z is reshaping brands and culture, sharing the stage with Alok Jain, JioStar's Head of Hindi & English Entertainment.

Dhupia was blunt about the maths of it. She got on Roadies unmarried, with none of the life she has now. Twenty-one years later she's in her 40s, a mother of two, still standing in front of a camera on a show built for viewers half her age. "I didn't think, as a woman in my 40s, I would be on a youth-based show that is loved, that is cult," she said. "But at the same time, I knew the one thing that kept me from getting from that point to here. That I have a voice."

Her point wasn't really about age. It was about not bending the voice to whatever's trending that week. "I don't think because things are trending I will say something that's not me," she said. "I think you can be under different umbrellas, keeping the authenticity intact."

The industry side of the argument

Jain's framing was more corporate, but it landed on similar ground. He argued the entertainment business doesn't need to fight generational change, it needs to read it fast enough to keep up. "The competition is the next company," he said. "In our case, the competition is time because, as people age, consumer behaviour changes."

His fix is spreading a show across every surface a viewer might land on. He pointed to Hustle, JioStar's other property, as the template — Spotify, live events, social, television, mobile, all running at once. "We want to reach every surface possible," he said, describing it as building the touchpoints that let fandom actually form instead of just watching numbers on a dashboard.

It's a fair pairing of arguments. Dhupia's case is personal: don't fake it, and the audience will keep showing up. Jain's is structural: be everywhere, so the audience never has to go looking. Roadies has run on both for two decades now, somehow.

Both Roadies - REBIRTH and Hustle 5 - Apna Homeground are currently streaming on JioStar, with MTV India carrying the television side of the franchise. Whether either format holds its Gen-Z audience through a 22nd season is the question JioStar will have to keep answering, not just Dhupia.