Saina Nehwal is in news for past 1 month. Besides performing her career best, she has achieved what most of athletes or sport persons could not achieve. Earlier it was heart breaking to see a very small space provided to her Chennai open win. Story of her second tourney win occupied the same amount of space and media kept its promise by giving the same paper on her third win as well. But it was fascinating to see the awareness of people in India.
Besides not getting the deserving coverage, there were thousands of people who reached to receive Miss Champ. It was more appreciable as media did not provoke these applauses; these applauses were from people of India who made Saina a shining star. Here onward media started to unearth her detail most of the media could grab her daily routines and health diets. Government placed her in the elite league by presenting her the biggest sport medal.
But will this be a break for her? There are sports which pop up in the middle of nowhere to claim the limelight but this shine fades in front of Indian cricketing Community.
Saina has done well to reach to the number 2 and most importantly she could take her name to common people. But her success poses few difficult questions to answer.
First question, would she able to survive and digest the limelight? There are 10s of examples where it took time for sport persons to digest the sudden glamour and most of them just slipped into the trap of glamour. Saina is also a human being, so it is okay to slip once but if she is able to stand up after first slipping then it is not difficult for her to ride and enjoy the glamour.
Second question, would her future efforts pose the threat of switching sport dharma? In my opinion in this era it is possible. People are exhausted with the extreme cricket and their exhaustion can prompt them to get rid of loyalty of cricket.
These 2 questions are somehow related to each other and answers depend on Saina's performance. Now if she wants to depict herself as the survivor (From media fame) as well as reformer (new trends of sport), she has to curb all difficulties to follow the same road map that has given her this glory. I do not know future but I can just wish the young lady and expect her to break all the records created in the history of badminton.
Best of luck Saina.
I am a little worried. BTW, what happened to our tennis star, Sania? I don't read any news about her these days.
ReplyDeleteIt's tragic I guess. To topple over cricket as the most watched and followed sports in India, any other sports would take at-least a decade, that's an optimistic guess I think.
Topple over is not required, It is just 1% of indians who can change everything...
ReplyDeleteOur need is just an another sport where we can start winning and keep winning continuously...
Sania is in Pakistan, psychs. She was a just a few games wonder. Waste of a talent.
ReplyDeleteBut I somehow, I find Saina really talented and she looks more determined among the current crop of non-cricket athletes to achieve success. However, Cricket can never be replaced in India, by any sport. At best, we can hope, that all sports get their share of exposure which encourages and convinces the young and budding sports persons that there is space to make it big in other sports as well. Success breeds exposure and exposure breeds talent pools and talent pools increases the chances of success.
Forget about replacing, even to decrease the popularity of the game from the current position is difficult or kinda unthinkable.
ReplyDeleteYeah Saina got talent, and she plays up to her caliber she can achieve what most Indian could not achieve till now. I think it would be more than enough to encourage new brigade of players to choose something other than cricket and that will open new era and indian sport may achieve new heights