"Yes, I did make mistakes initially. But once I realised it, I have been particular about my music. However, people keep making false allegations because it’s easy to do that. Since the last three years, I have stopped taking false allegations seriously," music director Pritam had said back in 2016.
Ten years down the line, the plagiarism allegations are back to haunt the veteran Bollywood composer.
After the release of the high-energy track Mashooqa from Cocktail 2 on May 19, the internet is once again debating and comparing the new song to an old Italian tune.
Mashooqa, composed by Pritam, features the well-received Kriti Sanon-Shahid Kapoor pairing.
Shot at the beaches and countryside of Sicily in Italy, YouTube viewers were delighted with the music video. The summer party anthem featured the couple on a road trip, with visuals of tango dances and tropical views reminiscent of Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara.
However, while YouTube's viewers were appreciating the song and its video, Reddit users were quick to draw a resemblance between the track and an Italian song from 1993.
“Pritam’s at it again?” a user wrote, posting a 27-second clip editing together different parts of the video and the Italian track to show similarities between the two.
The 1993 Neapolitan comedy track Se So Arrubate a Nonna by the Italian duo Bibi e Coco, from volume 2 of the Le Origini album, is the song Pritam is borrowing, according to Reddit.
The post said that the beats in the Italian song and the Bollywood number are in sync from the melody lift (the hook). In response to the post, some users also pointed out that Honey Singh’s 2025 track shared the same title, further fuelling online speculation.
Pritam, who has faced multiple plagiarism allegations in the past, often has users creating a list of his songs and comparing them to international hits.
However, some fans were quick to defend him, calling it sampling, a term frequently used in the music industry for the process of taking a snippet of an existing recording, song, or composition, and reworking it within a new song.
Fans even cited instances where international artists such as Taylor Swift and Kanye West used older songs as inspiration.
Despite the controversy, Bollywood fans remain excited about the June 19 release of Cocktail 2, which also stars Rashmika Mandanna.