जिगरा

Jigra (जिगरा) is the fiery title track of Vasan Bala's 2024 sibling-rescue thriller Jigra, and its biggest behind-the-scenes surprise: it is sung by the film's own co-lead, Vedang Raina, who steps out from the frame to give voice to the story's spirit of defiance. Composed by Achint (Achint Thakkar, best known for the Scam 1992 theme) and written by Varun Grover, the track was released by Saregama on 7 October 2024 as the film's third single, four days ahead of the 11 October theatrical release. Built as a battle-cry of resilience — 'you learned the proverb only by falling' — the song plays to Alia Bhatt and Vedang Raina's brother-sister survival arc, and became part of the breakout year that won Achint the R. D. Burman Award for New Music Talent at the 70th Filmfare Awards.

Achint Thakkar — the composer who broke out with the Scam 1992 theme — builds Jigra as a rock-leaning film anthem rather than a radio dance single: a slow-burning verse that swells into a driving, guitar-and-drum chorus engineered for the film's high-stakes emotion. The production leans on distorted guitar textures, propulsive percussion and layered synth swells to give the track its 'pumped-up' lift, while keeping Vedang Raina's untrained-but-earnest lead vocal at the centre. Raina — primarily an actor who made his debut in The Archies (2023) — sings the title track himself, and Achint frames that raw, unpolished voice as an asset, matching the film's grounded, defiant tone rather than smoothing it into a conventional playback gloss.

Varun Grover — the National Award-winning lyricist of 'Moh Moh Ke Dhaage' and the writer behind Sacred Games — grounds Jigra in the imagery of endurance rather than romance. The opening couplet, 'Tune gir kar hi kahaavat ye jaani / Saare angaare tu barfeela paani' ('you learned the proverb only by falling / all embers, yet you are ice-cold water'), sets up the song's central paradox: the hero who has been burned enough to become unshakeable. Grover threads in a Punjabi turn — invoking the Sufi poet Bulleh Shah on letting go of the fear of dying — so the lyric moves between motivational directness and a folk-philosophical undertow, mirroring the word 'jigra' itself: guts, heart, and the fortitude to keep standing.

Jigra (2024) is a sibling-rescue thriller directed by Vasan Bala and produced by Karan Johar and Apoorva Mehta's Dharma Productions with Alia Bhatt and Shaheen Bhatt's Eternal Sunshine Productions and Viacom18 Studios. It stars Alia Bhatt as Satyabhama 'Satya' Anand, a fiercely protective sister who fights to save her younger brother Ankur — played by Vedang Raina — from execution on death row in a foreign country. The title track was released as the film's third single on 7 October 2024, four days before the 11 October theatrical release, with a music video directed by Vijay Ganguly and shot by cinematographer Swapnil S. Sonawane. Its casting twist — the film's own co-lead Vedang Raina singing the anthem about the very courage his character embodies — tied the single directly to the movie's core of loyalty, sacrifice and defiance against impossible odds.

Though Jigra opened to a muted box-office response, its music became one of the more durable takeaways of the project — and a marker in composer Achint Thakkar's rapid rise from web-series scoring to mainstream film music. At the 70th Filmfare Awards in 2025, Achint won the R. D. Burman Award for New Music Talent, with Jigra among his headline credits, while Alia Bhatt took Best Actress. For Vedang Raina, the title track doubled as proof of a second craft: an actor barely one film into his career fronting his own movie's anthem, foreshadowing a music-and-acting dual path. The song sits within a wider 2020s trend of Hindi title tracks built as motivational rock anthems rather than romantic set-pieces — and remains the clearest showcase of the Achint–Varun Grover–Vedang Raina collaboration.