Sania Mirza Quotes

The fastest rising star in women's tennis is adored by millions in her home country. But the Muslim teenager has been denounced by extremist clerics for dressing in a 'corrupting' way. Now she needs bodyguards to provide constant protection.

All I want to do is play.

It's been 20 years since I started playing tennis and I've spent a decade playing singles and doubles professionally. I still enjoy singles and may play in an occasional tournament or at the Fed Cup if my country needs me. But I think the time has now come for me to completely shift my focus onto doubles.

On 12 February 2005 thousands of people started gathering at dawn for the final of the Hyderabad Open [to watch Sania in the final] and, by 10 in the morning, so dense were the crowds outside that it was difficult to get into the Fateh Maidan complex. There for the match were film stars from south India as well as local government officials; corporate VIPs from Mumbai, labourers from nearby towns and families who had travelled hundreds of miles from Delhi.

Leaves me with no choice but to laugh. I am pretty sure these are not the pre-wedding jitters or butterflies in the stomach my married cousins were talking about!

India is the country that produced such cultured male players as Vijay Amritraj and Ramesh Krishnan, and she might have been expected to place as much emphasis on old-style craft as crunch. In fact, her all-out aggression, underpinned by the sort of destructive forehand that was the signature of her role model Steffi Graf's game, makes her a very contemporary player indeed. To become a top-10 player, she has to work on her mobility and add some dimension to a game that is too dependent on the weighty forehand.

Fitness is defined differently by everyone, but for me, the most important thing is being healthy. As tennis players, what we do is not the healthiest thing. We almost abuse our bodies.

Playing for the country is an honour. The ultimate honour, in fact. If you want to look at it as pressure, you will find it very difficult to cope with the expectations of a billion people. I look at it as an opportunity, as being among the few who have been given this opportunity to make the country proud.

I think people tend to forget that as celebrities we are still human. We have the same emotions - we cry, we have fun, we laugh, we get sad, and we get hurt. When something is written about you, which millions of people are reading, and it is not true, imagine how hurtful it can be.

A defeat at any stage, whether in the first round or in the final of a major tournament, is always disappointing. But as sportsmen, we learn to pick ourselves up to bounce back and move on for the next challenge.

The media is only concerned with trying to sell themselves through concocted sensationalism. I try to avoid them and rarely read their concocted stories.

A couple of weeks ago, the 21-year-old was photographed with her feet up while watching a colleague playing in an international exhibition match in Perth, and the proximity of her toes to a nearby Indian flag raised temperatures in her home state to vindaloo levels.

When she first emerged, she was celebrated as an example of how well religious integration was working in a country that has a Muslim president, a Sikh prime minister, and a Christian leader of its Congress party. The controversy over her clothes was seen as an absurdity by mainstream Muslim leaders.

I think being a woman celebrity is the hardest thing in India.... People will ask many things, what you wear, how you speak, when you will have a baby and other things.

She is the highest ranked female tennis player ever from India, with a career high ranking of 27 in singles and 7 in doubles. She knows from her early experiences about the hardships that tennis players from India have to endure in order to become a successful professional. She had a long cherished vision for Tennis in India. The Vision - "To pave a way for Indian Tennis by training and promoting urban and rural talent and to enable our players to make a significant mark in the world of international tennis."