Hindi cinema has songs for falling in love, getting married, drinking, road trips and even the occasional extended family celebration. Yet one voice has mostly stayed in the background: the child’s. The new song Adults Wrong Hai from the upcoming film Little Thomas steps into that gap, turning a seven-year-old’s confusions into a comic, period-specific musical number.
What the song is
Little Thomas stars Gulshan Devaiah and Rasika Dugal and is directed by Kaushal Oza. Its new track, released by Junglee Music, a Times Music division, is sung by Anupam Barman and composed by Shailendra Barve. Co-producer Ranjan Singh wrote the lyrics with Iago. The song follows Thomas, a seven-year-old in mid-1990s Goa, who has received too many vague answers to his favourite question—where babies come from—and now has advice for his younger sibling: eat what you like, play as much as you can, and do not believe everything adults say.
The setting shapes the song. Singh told ETV Bharat that the film lives in a middle-class home under financial pressure, so the words had to belong to that world. “We had to talk to children as in millennials, who were growing up in the 90s. We had to get the mood and the vocabulary right,” he said. The result mixes Hindi and English in a way that suits Goa’s multilingual culture, but it is not a nursery rhyme.
A rare place in the soundtrack
Hindi cinema has produced memorable songs about childhood without necessarily giving children their own musical voice. The contrast is useful:
- Lakdi Ki Kathi in Masoom (1982) endures as a children’s rhyme framed by adult nostalgia.
- Bum Bum Bole in Taare Zameen Par (2007) gives a child a moment of release.
- Mera Jahan, also from Taare Zameen Par, was composed by Shailendra Barve and is often cited for its sensitivity to a child’s inner world.
- Adults Wrong Hai differs because the child is the speaker, with his own imperfect logic.
Writing that voice is hard. A children’s song can tip into an adult’s idea of childhood, full of sweetness but no real questions. Little Thomas avoids the trap by letting Thomas sound irreverent and occasionally unreasonable, like an actual seven-year-old.
Why Singh made room for it
For Singh, the film was partly a response to a larger absence. “There is not enough content for children in India,” he told ETV Bharat. He argues that children are growing up faster through early internet exposure, which gives them information without always giving them room to explore at their own pace.
He points to Bluey, the Australian animated series, as evidence that small-scale stories about family, play and everyday childhood dilemmas can become global hits. The lesson for Hindi cinema is not that every children’s song must become a chartbuster. It is that young characters deserve more moments where their own questions drive the story.
Source: ETV Bharat National
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