Sania Mirza

It is difficult to believe that a slender, 18-year-old Muslim tennis player from India has the potential to change the world, but it is equally difficult to overestimate the effect Sania Mirza is having on millions of young men and women, and especially women, in the world's second most populous country. She is the first female Indian tennis player to be ranked in the world's top 40; indeed, she is the first significant female athlete of any kind, in a country where women have been typically discouraged from taking up sport. 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. She is celebrated as much for her attitude and fashion sense (she wears a nose-ring and "librarian" glasses) as she is for her talent. She evidently enjoys the attention and delights in confounding expectations of exactly how a young Muslim woman from the subcontinent should behave. 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".

All this means that Mirza is in ceaseless demand - for interviews, billboard advertising, endorsements (her fee is reported to be second only to the great batsman Sachin Tendulkar's) and television appearances. But already she is becoming something of a prisoner of her own celebrity in a rapidly modernising country of more than a billion people. She can no longer even leave the Hyderabad home she shares with her parents without the obligatory bodyguards.