I wrote this film because I wanted to play this character and I knew the only way to do that is by writing it myself."[4] Singh wrote the script with his sister, basketball player Mukti Singh Srinet, in 2013 and sought a financier for it.[5][6][7] He looked at the "player's struggles — those who couldn't find their way up because they couldn't land in the officials' good books; the bad conditions they lived, played and practised in".[5] He mentioned a single incident that triggered the script was seeing his senior, who had won several boxing medals and whose photographs had appeared in the newspaper, "stealthily porting luggage" at the Varanasi Junction railway station to make ends meet.[5][3] When Singh saw him, he was trying to hide his face behind the luggage.