Wednesday, January 16, 2008

I am with you Sania

Currently Sania Mirza is through to the 2nd round in the Australian open and might potentially face Venus Williams in the 3rd round. I read an article about her on Tennis.com.
She is just a 21 year old who is not only dealing with stardom, tons of money, pressures on court but she is also forced to deal with a ton of controversies and thanks to us-- Indians.
I do not understand why do we have to make big deal out of everything. If she had her bare feet very close to the Indian Flag, write an article about that and please forget that, don't go ahead and launch a full force legal case against her.
I agree she might not be one of the players on the top, she might meander around the 30-40s ranking and might eventually dwindle out but what is worth noticing here are the ranks that she has reached inspite of having grown up in India.
Why do I say this: last year I was in India for a vacation. My brother in law was a member of the international sports club(or something of that sort) which boasted of tennis courts.
Getting to play "an hour of tennis" itself and that too in one of most so called progressive cities in India, Banglore took us all day. The drive to place which was in the outskirts took us almost 2 and 1/2 hours. When we reached there we didn't even get good tennis rackets to rent, he first thought we were there to play badminton, anyways finally the court we played in was in pretty bad shape as well as way too expensive.
Compare that to playing in USA? you could literally find a tennis court every 5 mins of drive, joining a social league is just a phone call away or an email away.
Inspite of all this Sania is there and perhaps thanks to her we may soon see more youngsters playing tennis, frankly speaking I dont know how Sania did it.
and what do we give her in return? Controversies.
I think it is high time we stopped minding Sania's businesses and instead did something about infrastructure, something about affordability, something about instilling a love for sports in young children and truly salute the ones with the beacon...go Sania!

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