Ambition Gone Awry?

The story of David and Goliath is as much a tale of caution for unbridled imagination as it is an underdog fable. The five protagonists of this story create a Goliath for the noble cause of freedom, but even then there are chances of their ideals being corrupted and their plans scuppered by a single slingshot. That is as much of a subtle subtext there is in this novel-cum-comic from entrepreneur Aritra Sarkar.

The tale of suppression and oppression takes place in the village of HanX outside Shenzhen.  Five youngsters – Di, Chan, Peng, Ken and Wu – decide to end tyranny and organizational corruption in their village by building a giant robot to take on the rich and mighty and the army they have. They get the support of the villagers and a few upper-class sympathisers. The giant robot sputters into life and does its job, but is it enough?

The age-old problem writers have of not knowing the audience they want to address rears its head in a big way. The writing is more of very young adult, but there is quite a bit of sex even though the whole story is 50 pages in extremely large fonts. The story never hides its revolutionary leanings, but the last few pages go into management training mode. Claiming to be the world’s first dual-facing novel, the reverse end of ‘Goliath of Shenzhen’ is a graphic novel telling the same story. Going by the content, one would think that maybe rich young boys with raging hormones are meant to be the target! Well, there is a gist of a short story somewhere here, but it is lost among the babble.