‘Sania has the potential to change the world’

LONDON—After making it to the cover of Time magazine, Sania Mirza finds herself listed as one of the ten people capable of changing the world by London’s intellectual weekly New Statesman published on Monday.
In a 742-word article by Jason Cowley, the weekly says 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 Mumbai-born Sania Mirza, currently No.37 in the WTA singles rankings, is having on millions of young men and women, and especially women.
“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,” the article says.
It notes that Sania has the discipline, tenacity, 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.
Sania is bracketed with the likes of Emir of Qatar, who is showing the Middle East a different route to modernity, Barack Obama, America’s fastest-rising political star, current US senator for Illinois, Anton Zeilinger and Physicist and co-director, institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Vienna, Samira Makhmalbaf. —Agencies