At the time of Krissna's arrival, the script was not complete; he met the screenwriter Shanmugasundaram, who narrated the main story: the "friendship between a poor milkman and a rich man, with the former's house being a point of conflict". Krissna realised there was still a lot of work to be done because reasons like "why does his house mean so much to him, why does the rich man's father hate this milkman, what angers the hero so much that he goes against his rich friend" had yet to be established. The story was based on the Hindi film "Khudgarz" (1987), which itself was based on Jeffrey Archer's novel "Kane and Abel". Unlike "Khudgarz", where the rich man was the main character, Rajinikanth's character, the poor man, was made the main character. When Krissna asked Shanmugasundaram about the "incomplete pockets" in the story, Shanmugasundaram replied that it could all be developed over the course of production. Shanmugasundaram had been hired at Rajinikanth's suggestion, but Balachander wrote the dialogues for a scene involving the title character and the MLA Ekambaram (Vinu Chakravarthy) at Rajinikanth's insistence.