Agent Vinod

Agent Vinod is the soundtrack to Sriram Raghavan's 2012 spy thriller of the same name, starring Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor. Pritam Chakraborty composed the twelve-track album, with lyrics primarily by Amitabh Bhattacharya and additional contributions from Neelesh Misra, and it was released through T-Series on 17 February 2012.^[1]

Reviews of the album were mixed. Bollywood Hungama's Joginder Tuteja awarded it three stars, singling out the theme track as "an absolute killer," while Filmfare's Rachit Gupta gave it two stars and dismissed it as "a stilted, one and a half horse album."^[1] The record also drew controversy: "Pyaar Ki Pungi" faced plagiarism accusations from the Iranian band Barobax, who later withdrew the claim, and "I'll Do the Talking Tonight" required Pritam to license an interpolation of Boney M's 1978 hit "Rasputin" for the film's nightclub sequence.^[1]

The album's most consequential legacy, however, is a single composition treated four different ways. "Raabta" appears as an unreleased Arijit Singh solo, as the "Night in a Motel" version actually placed in the film (with Aditi Singh Sharma), as the moody "Siyaah Raatein" (with Hamsika Iyer and English verses from Joi), and as "Kehte Hain Khuda Ne" (with Shreya Ghoshal). Arijit Singh, then working primarily as Pritam's music programmer, sang the reference vocal that ended up carried across all four versions, an early credit that preceded his breakout the following year.^[2]

"Raabta" outlasted the film's own mixed fortunes to become a standalone romantic standard, ranking among the best-loved Hindi love songs of 2012, and its title and concept were revisited five years later as the basis for a loosely related 2017 film and title track.^[2]