Every night, Akshat Verma would lie on his bed and take a long, hard look at the ceiling fan. Dangling precariously from the roof, the squeaky old thing would give him nightmares. “What if it fell down?” he would wonder. He would imagine it fall, leaving the roof cracked open and a foot sticking out of it. It is this recurring thought that became the basis of Delhi Belly’s story that Verma wrote over a year-and-a-half.

He revised it 15 times before leaving it with Mumbai producers and directors. It eventually landed in Kiran Rao’s hands and left her in peals of laughter. Verma went on to become Delhi Belly’s writer, associate director and co-producer and the film, a hit. Though he has adapted a novel, Ode to Lata into a film called Lata, Delhi Belly is his official debut.

“The foot was the trigger point from where I built the story backwards,” says the writer, who is also the co-owner of a production house named Ferocious Attack Cow. Each of the film’s characters as well as situations have been picked from real life — inspired by his crazy bunch of friends, Delhi University days, his stint as a journalist and in advertising.

Even the double rejection from the country’s top film schools plays a role in his success. “Had I not been rejected, I would’ve never learnt the real method of making films. I returned to India to make films in a new frame and I wanted my writing to resonate with the Indian audience,” says Verma, who has been inspired by Jaspal Bhatti and Woody Allen films.

According to him, to survive in India, one needs to be irreverent. But it’s the sense of reality that rules his writing. “This is something I get from the western way of filmmaking. They bring a sense of reality to their cinema,” he says. The world of Delhi Belly is as real as it can get with load-shedding, water cuts and crumbling buildings. With Delhi Belly, Verma picked up the pieces and amplified them.