British magazine says Sania Mirza can change the world

The usually staid British media has gone overboard with praise for Indian tennis sensation Sania Mirza with a leading intellectual magazine listing her as one of the 10 people capable of changing the world.When Sania made waves at Wimbledon this year, tennis writers waxed lyrical about her poise and skills on and off the court.

Now 'New Statesman', the high priest of British left-of-centre politics - some call it the symbol of intellectual fundamentalism - has declared that Sania has the promise to 'change the world'.In an almost breathless 750-word piece on Sania, writer Jason Cowley recounts her recent tiff with Muslim clerics over her dress code on the court, but moves on to describe the effect she has on India's young men and women - especially women."Mirza has the discipline, the tenacity, the flamboyance and, above all, the talent to go much higher in the rankings and, in so doing, inspire a whole new generation of Indian girls to express their hopes and ambitions through sport."At home, in India, Mirza is a role model and an icon, her fame locating her somewhere between Bollywood and the mass adulation that surrounds the Indian cricket team", Cowley wrote.

The piece recalled that at Wimbledon, she wore a T-shirt bearing the slogan: "Well-behaved women rarely make history"; at the US Open in September, where she lost in the quarter-final to the Russian sensation Maria Sharapova, her T-shirt read: "You can either agree with me, or be wrong".Recalling the threats from a Muslim cleric of the Sunni Ulema Board, Cowley wrote: "The cleric is correct in identifying the world-transforming potential of a young, attractive, articulate and media-smart teenage Muslim tennis star, but wrong in his assessment of that influence. "He understands how sport has become a common language for the global tribe, as well as an engine of change, an aggressive symbol of meritocracy and the mirror in which we see reflected back at us the competitive, style-driven, money- and celebrity-fixated world in which we live. "Tennis is one of the few sports in which women enjoy parity with men; female tennis players are among the wealthiest and most celebrated of all sports personalities.

"Can Mirza have a similarly transformative effect, not only in India but also throughout the world? He enthuses, "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".Cowley concludes by writing: "If she continues to improve as rapidly as she has over the past six months, Sania Mirza will simply have to get used to such obsessive scrutiny. There is no turning back now."