It was while on a Mumbai local that Nihit Bhave got an idea that would become a film directed by Anurag Kashyap. It was 2013, and he, then a writer at an entertainment newspaper working out of an office in Lower Parel, would travel 45 minutes daily from Bhayander. As writers usually do, he would observe those around him, but was particularly interested in one group. "They are neither rich nor poor, not even middle class. They are the lower rung of the middle class. They don't have the luxuries, or basic necessities.

The frustration of this section gave me the idea," he says in a telephonic interview.