A totalitarian regime with questionable intentions wants to clear a piece of forested land for its own selfish gains. Its most unscrupulous members are assigned the job of getting it done. They build a villainous team that employs every dirty trick in the book to achieve this end. But they meet with resistance from those whose very existence will be at stake if the deforestation does take place. And there is thus a battle where a citizen's movement of sorts is pitted against the nefarious machinations of the powers that be.

If that sounds like it is too close to home, it's not necessarily so, since it's the overarching plot of a new comic book that will be released as a series on social media, starting tomorrow. It's called Rashtrayana II: Divide and Fool, and George Mathen — who goes by the moniker of Appupen — has created it. The plot features a superhero, Rashtraman, who's actually an antagonist drunk on power. He's the one who intends to clear the forest, for which he builds a crack team of characters with questionable intentions. They include PropaGandhi, who — as the name suggests — is in charge of building propaganda in favour of the felling of trees, putting an army of trolls on the job. Then there's Batmanu. His job is to hand out bats to people that they can use as weapons against the peaceful and non-violent enemy. Vigil Aunty, on the other hand, is entrusted with the responsibility of upholding women's rights, except that her belief system is aligned more with the Manusmiriti than with women's lib. Together, they join hands with some other like-minded people to mirror totalitarian regimes across the planet.