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- Not a richly deserved award
This story is from February 1, 2006
Not a richly deserved award
In the first place, one can question the government's competence to hand out awards in areas outside its ambit.
But even in this context, is she deserving of such laurels? Apart from winning one ATP singles title at the 2005 Hyderabad Open and reaching the fourth and third rounds respectively of the 2005 US Open and 2005 Australian Open, she has done precious little by world standards.
It's true she bettered her ranking which was 206 at the end of 2004 to 31 in slightly less than a year, and that's greatly creditable. But since then she's been steadily underperforming.
She crashed out of the Australian Open in January this year after a straight sets loss in the women's singles second round, lost thrice to players ranked weaker than her, and as of this week has had her ranking reassigned to 34.
Without an Olympic gold medal or a Grand Slam title, and an Arjuna award already under her belt, the government giving her yet another award hardly makes any sense.
The media on the other hand is simply going to lap it up. As it is, the reason Sania is so constantly on everyone's mental horizon is because of the hoopla generated by print and electronic disseminators.
They have succeeded in hyping her image to such an extent that it seems India doesn't have any other sportspeople besides her and a bunch of cricketers.
Be it her nose ring, short skirts or defiantly emblazoned T-shirts, she's mostly in the news for the wrong reasons, and always stirring up ridiculous controversy in the process.
Whatever happened to playing the game better and better? Is the greatest thing they're ever going to say about her that she went to a level in tennis where no Indian woman had gone before? Being a flash in the pan is not enough; incandescence has to be sustained.
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