During the recording of the background score of Mani Ratnam's "Thiruda Thiruda" (1993), the Bombay riots broke out. Mani Ratnam planned on making a film in Malayalam about a boy who gets lost in the riots, and requested M. T. Vasudevan Nair to write the script. This was supposed to be Mani Ratnam's second Malayalam film after "Unaru" (1985). But since the idea did not materialise, he decided to make it in Tamil as the film that would later be titled "Bombay".