PATNA: "Nothing lasts forever. It was quite silence in Antartica, a crewmate named Black and his family of three kids and a wife lived there. Black lost his two kids and his wife too. The third child disappeared. Black had two problems-The Space Mafia attack and Rash virus. Black had betrayed his crewmembers in the Spaceship attack".
These are excerpts from the 83 page-long science fiction “Space Mafia on the Loose”, written by not any celebrated writers but by 11-year-old Bihar-born Shaurya Mishra ,a class five student of Delhi Public School in Ahmedabad.
Shaurya Mishra ran riot with his imaginations during the lockdown and wrote the book on a horrible space war in the future. It took almost two months of his concentrated efforts to complete “Space Mafia on the Loose” on an old cell phone, provided by her mother Sheerya Mishra.
Shaurya aspires to become an astronaut and always engages himself in reading books on space, journals and watching scientific channels and documentaries. He lives with his father Bimlesh Kumar Mishra of Darbhanga of Bihar, who is a top executive in a British organisation and mother Shreeya Mishra -- an LLM holder and practising lawyer.
"I was getting bored as there were no regular classes. I missed my friends and playing in the apartment ground. I started thinking of space when everything else was in a vacuum,” Shaurya said
Shaurya said that during the lockdown, his mind jumped quickly to Antarctica and then to space after he invented some codes that made inter-planet communication possible, along with D class(Disposable class),wardrobe where machines and guns are kept, heavy compartment zones(resembling containment zones) in his imagination. The only thing left to be done was to put them all down somewhere.
Shaurya wrote the entire story on an old cell phone sans sim card which was given by his mother when he expressed being comfortable writing using the gadget. “This is my first experience with book writing. This science fiction speaks abut space adventures, where space habitants try to steal planets”, Shaurya said, adding that it took almost two months to complete his debut work.
He said his passion is to become an astronaut one day and hence is studying hard. “I want my creativity and imagination not to take a back seat and get rusted. I need to stay motivated and keep my creative juice flowing and energising me to explore whatever is still remains hidden in the space”, he said.
In 2014, he was awarded a certificate in story-telling followed by a gold medal in the National Rubix Cube Championship in 2018. Apart from writing, he sketches brilliantly on paper and other digital devices.