There is a girl in every small Punjabi town. She has a dream that is too large for the place she was born in. She wants a career she can call her own. She wants love that is worth the risk. And every single day, the world around her has a hundred quiet ways of telling her to want less.
GTC Punjabi thinks that girl deserves her own show. And from today, she has one.
Sweety Beauty Parlour, GTC Punjabi’s new fiction series, premieres this evening at 6:30 PM, Monday to Friday.
A Beauty Parlour. A Big Dream. And a World That Pushes Back.
The show centres on Sweety, a young woman from a Punjabi small town who plans to run her own beauty parlour and refuses, against considerable odds, to let anyone tell her she cannot. She is funny. She is fearless. She is also, in the quiet hours, fragile in the way that only truly brave people are. The beauty parlour is her stage and her sanctuary — the place where she plans to build the life she has always imagined.
And then there is Goldy. Played by Navdeep, Goldy is the complication Sweety never asked for and finds she cannot walk away from — the kind of person who arrives in your life and quietly rearranges everything. The chemistry between the two leads gives the show its pulse: warm and sparring, tender and complicated.
Sweety is played by Mannat, whose performance in the early episodes is a thing of quiet revelation. She does not play Sweety as a heroine. She plays her as a person — specific, contradictory, impossible to reduce to a type. That specificity is what makes the show feel real.
A Filmmaker Who Knows Punjab’s Soul
The creative authority behind the show is Gaurav Rana, the filmmaker whose previous work — the acclaimed Punjabi features Chauser and Mohre — established him as one of the most emotionally intelligent voices in Punjabi storytelling. Rana brings a film director’s instinct for character and frame to a television canvas, and the difference shows. There is a visual restraint and a narrative patience in Sweety Beauty Parlour that Punjabi television fiction rarely allows itself.
The neighbourhood beauty parlour as a setting is deceptively rich. It is a place built on intimacy, where women share confidences they keep from the rest of the world, where relationships are made and strained, where gossip and grief sit side by side. Rana understands this space, and he uses it.
“Sweety is not a character. She is every girl from every small Punjabi town who has sat in her room at night and imagined a bigger life — and then woken up the next morning and actually tries to build it. Gaurav Rana has brought cinematic craft to this story that Punjabi television has never quite seen. Mannat and Navdeep make you believe every word. We are proud of this show the way you are proud of something that tells the truth.”
— Dr. Rabindra Narayan, Founder and MD, GTC Network
A Channel That Is Clearly Just Getting Started
The launch of Sweety Beauty Parlour is not the only announcement GTC Punjabi is making today. The channel has also launched Surtaaj Of Punjab, a singing talent competition that sets out to find the finest vocal talent from Punjab and its global diaspora. Auditions are open as of today. The show goes to air April through July 2026.
Beyond that, GTC Network has greenlit two additional original fiction series currently in pre-production, and has commenced work on a slate of original Punjabi short films that will air on Punjabi Shorts — the world’s first dedicated short-film channel in the Punjabi language — and across the network’s global OTT distribution. Details on titles, cast, and air dates will follow in the coming weeks.
GTC Punjabi is the flagship channel of GTC Network, founded by Dr. Rabindra Narayan, widely recognised as the Father of Punjabi Satellite Television, who launched the world’s first Punjabi satellite channel, Punjabi World, in 1998. The channel’s tagline — Rooh Punjab Di — is turning out to be more than a brand line. On the evidence of today’s launch, it is a statement of intent.
Sweety Beauty Parlour airs Monday to Friday at 6:30 PM on GTC Punjabi, available on DD Freedish (LCN 72), Tata Play (LCN 1904), Airtel DTH, Fastway, DEN, and Sky UK 770. The show streams on JioTV, YuppTV, DistroTV, and NeoTV+.
SWEETY BEAUTY PARLOUR — AT A GLANCE
Channel: GTC Punjabi (DD Freedish LCN 72, Tata Play LCN 1904, Airtel DTH, Fastway, DEN, Sky UK 770)
OTT: JioTV, YuppTV, DistroTV, NeoTV+ and more
Schedule: Monday to Friday, 6:30 PM IST
Director: Gaurav Rana (Chauser, Mohre)
Cast: Mannat as Sweety, Navdeep as Goldy
