Still, the MTVs around the world share that distinctive, hyperkinetic MTV footprint, and they are profoundly commercial, and not always profoundly artistic, enterprises. So some second-generation immigrants are leery of MTV's zeroing in on their market potential.
One young woman hoping to be a VJ, Niharika Desai, 27, declared during her interview that she had auditioned partly out of curiosity to see "what corporate America thinks of me."
Her comment met poker faces from Durrani, who that day wore all black and studded jewelry, and Lem Lopez, a Filipino-American executive producer for MTV World, who wore his long hair in a slipknot atop his head and his floral shirt loose and half unbuttoned.
"Not that you're corporate," Desai said to them, pedaling backward. "I know that you're a kinder, gentler version of the Man."
Projecting a kind of perky punk aesthetic, Desai wore her hair shaggy, with a streak of blond, her jeans folded up and her Converse sneakers faded. A video editor who grew up in upstate New York, she verbally motored on, trying to make amends, sort of.
"My whole thing coming here, it's really cool that there's going to be a desi channel," she said. "I also have some thoughts. Growing up, I became who I am more from influences in Poughkeepsie than from the Indian community. My parents didn't raise me watching Hindi films and what not. So I implore you, please do something more than Bollywood." Actually, she punctuated Bollywood with an expletive, and then again when she clarified: "Don't get me wrong. I love Bollywood. But desi kids in America would so benefit from having a cool influence and learning hip stuff, too, like MIA."
Desai was referring to Maya Arulpragasam, a Sri Lankan-English performer who goes by the stage name MIA. Clearing his throat, Durrani, who seemed to be charmed by Desai's irreverence, said simply: "I want to put you completely at ease. This isn't corporate America. And MIA is so central."
MIA is the daughter of a Tamil militant whose family fled the violence in Sri Lanka and eventually settled in a housing project outside London. There, she said in an interview that will be shown on MTV Desi, she started over as refugee "scum," with hand-me-down clothes, in special schools, on the lowest rung of the English social ladder.
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