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.

Who will guard the guards ? If we're the guards of society, then who will watch us and make sure that we're not dangerous?

I started watching reality shows and being horrified at people signing up to be humiliated in front of the entire country. … I saw one show, The Amazing Race, in which people were eating spicy soup and vomiting and crying. Why would you do that? Also, I was fascinated by these actors and actresses who would sign up to be followed around by cameras in their life. You become a celebrity, not because of your work or what you do, but because you have no privacy. I've been careful to keep my life separate because it's important to me to have privacy and for my life not to be a marketing device for a movie or a TV show. It's worth more than that. I'm worth more than that.

I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing.

And then, at this stage, every dictator comes up with the notorious and typical demand: he asks the people for bodyguards to protect him, the people's champion.

What are the dangers, then, involved in being a celebrity? On the one hand, there's … the true loss of the self by virtue of being over-democratized, over-saturated, over-loved, perhaps. Without an internally directed compass, an ego can drown in its own fascination, rendering the bearer unable to posit or hang anything actual onto themselves. This again is essentially the argument from commodification, which prescribes a kind of a ravenous, ecstatic feast upon a soul until it becomes defined purely in terms of its external ability to in fact be consumed.

How many of us human animals could endure the sight of our own selves, stripped of the garments of illusion with which we clothe them? In our infancy others begin to garb us in conventional illusions to spare their own sight, and later we ourselves continue the process - we carefully deck ourselves out in elaborate regalia of pretence to hide the raw nakedness of our souls, not only from others, but from ourselves as well. We hate most those who strip us bare - and their motive is generally one of self-protection, as a man points out the deformities in others to draw attention away from his own defects.

- A Thunder of Trumpets

The real people don’t come around you. It is the fake people that would choke you up. Wrong association is the worst thing that can happen to anyone especially those in the entertainment industry.

Fans put pressure on celebrities to lead fake lives. One needs a lot of discipline because the expectations of fans from celebrities are usually too high. A lot of them feel one should have a certain financial level and live a certain way. However, things don’t work that way. It’s not nice. Some people who don’t have wisdom and discipline fall for it. But, I thank God He gave me the wisdom to deal with that kind of pressure

"I put people in body bags when I'm right."

Fame has taken away my privacy. Fame has also taken away my peace of mind because people judge celebrities for diverse reasons. They have expectations which one can sometimes fall short of. Before I do anything, I think about it a lot because I don’t know how people will misinterpret it. Some people won’t just let you be. You can’t go out without makeup; you can’t go to events without looking fly (good), and it doesn’t matter if you have the funds for it or not. Before you do anything, you have to think about it because your life no longer belongs to you.

People treat actors and people in the public eye differently from how they’d treat anybody else in their lives. You would never come up to a stranger, throw your arm around them and say, ‘Hey, buddy, lemme get this picture.’ You think it’s OK to do that?

You falsely think that your fears protect you, your beliefs have made you what you are and your attachments make your life exciting and secure. You fail to see that they are actually a screen between you and life's symphony.

Animals in zoos (we are told) believe that their bars protect them. We Americans have forged our own bars, built our own cage, and live in it more or less content as long as someone feeds us.