Tennis star Sania Mirza can change the world
Sania Mirza is fast becoming a global icon. After featuring on the Time
Asia cover, Sania Mirza is now on the UK-based New Statesman magazine's
list of ‘Ten People Who Will Change the World'.
The 93-year-old New Statesman is among the most respected
political-literary-cultural weeklies in the UK: "an essential read for
bright thinkers everywhere," and its October 17 edition carries a cover
story on people who will transform the world.
According to one of the editors, the goal was to "identify people who
would have a profound impact on the world in the next decade or so".
Sania Mirza fits the bill not just because of her tennis but also
because she is seen as someone who can "inspire a whole new generation
of Indian girls to express their hopes and ambitions through sport". In
his article on Sania, Jason Cowley (editor of the Observer Sport
Monthly and Booker judge in the year Arundhati Roy won the award)
writes about the "world-transforming potential of a young, attractive,
articulate and media-smart teenage Muslim tennis star".
The idea according to the New Stattesman is to see Sania Mirza
and her sport as a symbol of a much bigger, and more sociologically
significant phenomenon. "Muhammad Ali, Pele, Evonne Goolagong, Viv
Richards, the so-called ghetto Cinderellas Venus and Serena Williams
and the Chinese basketball star Yao Ming — these sporting icons,
because of their fame, achievement and corporate power, have helped to
transform the way mainstream sporting audiences think about race,
gender and the old political structures that once controlled the games
we play.
"Can Mirza have a similarly transformative effect, not only in
India but also throughout the world? She may not have won a major
tournament, yet already she occupies a role through which flow many of
the most significant intellectual and cultural currents of our times:
the clash between secularism and political Islam, the emancipation of
women in the Muslim world, the dominance of celebrity, the tyranny of
the image, the emergence of India as a world power," Jason Cowley
writes.
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