तुमसे बेहतर

'Tumse Behtar' (Better Than You) is the romantic soul of Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari (Dharma Music, 2025) — Arijit Singh's solo contribution, composed and lyrically authored by Tanishk Bagchi. Rolling Stone India ranked it #21 in their Top 25 Bollywood Songs of 2025: 'simple and heartfelt gratitude set to melody — warm and honest without overcomplication.' In the film, it soundtracks the moment when Sunny stops being ironic about his feelings and admits, for the first time, that someone has made his life genuinely better.

Tanishk Bagchi's composition for 'Tumse Behtar' is in his most restrained register — acoustic guitar, piano, and a minimal string wash, with Arijit Singh's voice doing all the heavy lifting. In a 2025 Bollywood context where big production is often the default, the quietness of the arrangement is itself a statement. Arijit's mid-register delivery — avoiding the grand flourishes he deploys in more orchestral contexts — matches the song's emotional temperature precisely.

Bagchi's lyric for 'Tumse Behtar' inverts the typical Bollywood romantic formula: rather than the beloved being the most beautiful or the most desired, she is simply the best person the protagonist has encountered — 'better than you' in the sense of better than any version of anything he imagined. This shifts the register from desire to gratitude, which is rarer and, the song argues, deeper.

Tanishk Bagchi had been searching for the right song for the specific emotional moment in the film when Sunny's defenses come down. 'Tumse Behtar' emerged from a session where he asked himself what a person who doesn't know how to be vulnerable would sound like if they finally became vulnerable — and found that the only musical answer was one of complete simplicity.

Rolling Stone India's placement of 'Tumse Behtar' at #21 — above many flashier songs from 2025 — reflects the critical consensus that its emotional simplicity was more effective than the year's more elaborate romantic productions. The song became one of the most-shared pieces of text-over-video Instagram content in late 2025.