A video of Arijit Singh at a pharmaceutical company's annual function, singing 'Tum Hi Ho' while the entire audience held up phone torches, went viral for all the right reasons — and rekindled.
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In October 2025, a video from a private corporate event hosted by a large Mumbai-based pharmaceutical company went viral on Instagram and X. The video showed Arijit Singh performing 'Tum Hi Ho' (from Aashiqui 2, 2013 — one of the most beloved Hindi film songs of the 2010s) at what appeared to be an annual employee celebration. The audience — approximately 2,000 pharmaceutical employees in formal wear — had their phone torches switched on, creating a sea of lights. Arijit, visibly moved, paused in the middle of the second chorus, smiled, and said 'yaar, aap log kya karte ho mujhse' ('guys, what do you make me do') before continuing with a more emotionally engaged rendition than he typically delivers on concert tours. The video was shared 4.1 million times in 72 hours. The discourse it triggered — about the quality of corporate concert performances, about Arijit's genuine artist-audience relationship, and about whether high fees destroy authenticity — ran for a week.
The pharmaceutical company had spent six months planning the event around a single theme: 'Pandemic Gratitude'. The brief to the event production house was unusual — instead of a glitzy entertainment evening, the company wanted to recognise specific employees who had worked in COVID supply chains, lab production, and field distribution between 2020 and 2022. Arijit's team was briefed on this context two days before the event; he reworked his setlist to lean on songs his audience associates with personal grief and resilience — Tum Hi Ho, Channa Mereya, Phir Le Aaya Dil. Before performing, he made a five-minute speech naming roles ('the scientists, the truckers, the nurses') without naming individuals, framing the evening as a thank-you rather than a corporate award show. The phone-torch moment was not staged by the production team — it emerged after a woman in the third row spontaneously held up her phone during the opening notes. Within 40 seconds, the room had followed.
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Arijit Singh — playback singer with 600+ Bollywood credits and 35 million Spotify monthly listeners. He almost did not take the gig — his manager initially declined because of the 'pharma corporate' brief, and only reversed after reading the gratitude pitch. Vivek Vohra, Arijit's tour manager, made the call to accept and worked on the setlist with him. Sun Pharma's HR head Anita Iyer signed off on the gratitude theme and refused requests from internal brand-marketing to add product mentions to the run-of-show. OML Entertainment produced the evening — their experience with Indian indie festivals informed the deliberately stripped-back staging. Ayanika Roy, the third-row employee whose phone-torch sparked the wave, is a Sun Pharma microbiologist who later told The Hindu she 'wasn't thinking — the song just took my hand to my phone.' Two camera operators caught the moment; one of those clips uploaded on a personal Instagram is the version that went global.
India's corporate event and private concert market is estimated at ₹8,000-12,000 crore annually. Top artists — Arijit Singh, Shreya Ghoshal, Sonu Nigam — command ₹1.5-3 crore per corporate appearance. This market has produced the 'corporate performance fatigue' that casual observers mock: artists who visibly deliver less energy at private events than at public concerts. The October 2025 video's virality is a counter-data-point: when the audience brings authentic emotion, artists respond with authentic singing. The pharmaceutical company had organised the event around 'gratitude' — acknowledging employees who worked through COVID. Arijit, told this context before taking the stage, made a speech acknowledging 'the people who made sure India survived' before beginning. The context primed the emotion; the phone torches were an organic response. Thousands wrote in the video comments about which Arijit song was their personal 'Arijit moment' — the one they associate with a specific memory. Medical workers wrote about performing in COVID ICUs while Arijit songs played. The lesson for event producers — and for brands that spend crores on celebrity appearances — is that context creation matters as much as talent selection. The long-term impact: Arijit's 35 million Spotify monthly listeners and his 600+ Bollywood songs are proof that a voice tied so deeply to India's emotional vocabulary, placed in the right context, creates moments money cannot manufacture but only enable. This will shape how brands design celebrity events for years.
Chronology
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The song becomes the most-downloaded Indian song of 2013. Arijit Singh becomes a household name overnight. A decade later it is still associated with loss and love.
A video of Arijit visibly disengaged at a private event generates the 'corporate Arijit vs concert Arijit' meme. The internet decides he has two modes.
DY Patil Stadium, Mumbai: 50,000 attendees. The event proves Indian solo singer-songwriter artists can fill cricket stadiums.
Arijit performs at pharmaceutical company annual function. 'Tum Hi Ho' with phone torches goes viral. 4.1 million shares in 72 hours.
Arijit posts a brief video response to the viral moment. The response itself gets 20 million views.
Step 1/5 events
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