विदा करो

Vida Karo (विदा करो) is the farewell ballad from Amar Singh Chamkila (2024) that closes out the film's emotional arc — composed by A. R. Rahman on piano in the middle of the night, written by Irshad Kamil in roughly 45 minutes, and sung by Arijit Singh and Jonita Gandhi. Rahman specifically sought out Arijit Singh's voice for the track, believing only he could carry its emotional weight, while Kamil drew on the poetry of Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi to frame it as a plea for release — a goodbye sung on behalf of Chamkila and his wife Amarjot, whose real lives ended in violence. Released with the film's soundtrack on 29 March 2024, the song became one of the most widely watched tracks from the Netflix biopic, with its lyrical video alone crossing 12 million YouTube views, and was part of the Amar Singh Chamkila soundtrack that won the Filmfare OTT Award for Best Music Album in 2024.

Rahman built Vida Karo around a solo piano figure, reportedly composing it late at night in his studio — a departure from the folk-and-brass Punjabi textures elsewhere on the soundtrack. The recorded track layers a Chennai Strings Orchestra arrangement and flute (played by Nikhil Ram) beneath Arijit Singh and Jonita Gandhi's vocals, with Hiral Viradia credited as music supervisor and additional vocalist, and Nitish R Kumar handling the mix and master. Rahman has cited the melancholic melodicism of music from Guru Dutt's films as a reference point for the song's mood — using restraint and space rather than the Broadway-style theatricality found elsewhere in the album.

Irshad Kamil's lyric turns 'vida karo' — bid me farewell — into a repeated plea rather than a statement, drawing explicitly on the poetry of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, the Punjabi poet whose verses are steeped in themes of longing and mortality. Kamil has said he wrote the words in about 45 minutes, and the lyric's economy shows: short, insistent lines ('mainu vida karo... ab vida karo mere yaara') that function almost as a ritual chant of release rather than a narrated goodbye — leaving space for Rahman's piano and the strings to carry the song's emotional undertow rather than the words alone.

Amar Singh Chamkila (2024), directed by Imtiaz Ali and produced by Window Seat Films, Select Media Holdings and Saregama, dramatizes the life of Punjabi folk singer Amar Singh Chamkila (Diljit Dosanjh) and his wife and singing partner Amarjot Kaur (Parineeti Chopra), whose bold, often controversial lyrics made them hugely popular — and whose lives ended in an unsolved 1988 assassination. Vida Karo is positioned as the film's climactic farewell, voicing the couple's parting after a career shaped by both adulation and prejudice. The soundtrack released on 29 March 2024 through Saregama, ahead of the film's Mumbai premiere on 8 April and its Netflix release on 12 April 2024.

Vida Karo's lyrical video has drawn over 12.6 million YouTube views on the official Saregama Music channel, with a separate official video adding close to 11 million more — figures that place it among the most-watched individual tracks from the soundtrack. The song was part of the Amar Singh Chamkila album that won the Filmfare OTT Award for Best Music Album at the 2024 ceremony, contributing to a soundtrack widely praised by critics as one of A. R. Rahman's strongest post-2020 scores. Alongside the film's sweep of Filmfare OTT wins — including Best Film, Best Director for Imtiaz Ali, and Best Actor for Diljit Dosanjh — Vida Karo is frequently singled out by reviewers as the soundtrack's emotional high point.