Sania Mirza, a first among equals

DUBAI: First Indian woman to reach the third round of a Grand Slam event. First Indian woman to win a WTA event. First Indian woman to beat a top-10 player.

The list of firsts grows ever longer for Sania Mirza as she continues to rewrite the record books. It may help that India has never had a woman tennis player of any calibre before her, but there is no doubting Sania's talent. Hitting the ball hard from both flanks, the Hyderabadi teenager has a game unlike any other Indian women's tennis player ever. Her forte is not her defensive, retrieving ability or her consistency, but rather, her power from the baseline.

Everything about Sania oozes confidence. Even after being outplayed by Serbian Jelena Jankovic in the quarterfinals, the Indian refused to blame her ankle injury for her poor performance. She had upset No 4 seed Svetlana Kuznetsova despite an ankle injury. "I felt absolutely fine. The defeat had nothing to do with my ankle," she asserted. "It's just that Jelena played a superb match. I think I didn't play that badly, she made me look ordinary."

It's a comment that usually comes out of a mature battle-hardened professional, not someone who is just feeling her way around the circuit.

Her performances have sparked off Sania-mania, not just in India but among Indians settled abroad as well. In Dubai, organisers confessed that giving her a wild-card entry was the most inspired decision they had ever made as droves of Sania fans queued up outside the ticket office days she was slotted to play.

But Sania is aware that the stardom will last only as long as she keeps performing. Mentally, she appears very grounded an determined. "It is very tough to achieve stardom, but it's even tougher to stay at the top. People only see the glamour at the end but there is a lot of hard work that has gone into the making of any top athlete. I have worked 12 years to achieve what I have this year," she says. "Sometimes it all gets a bit too much facing the media all the time and answering the same questions again and again but that's the way it is. This is what I opted for and now I have to deal with it. It's not easy but I can't complain."