After Times, Sania Mirza dons New Statesman's cover

London: Sania Mirza is on her way to becoming a global icon. After featuring on the Time Asia cover, she’s now on the UK-based New Statesman magazine’s list of ‘Ten People Who Will Change the World’.

The 93-year-old New Statesman is among the most respected political-literary-cultural weeklies in the UK: “An essential read for bright thinkers everywhere”. Its October 17 edition carries a cover story on men and women who will transform the world.

According to one of the editors, the aim was to “identify people who would have a profound impact on the world in the next decade or so”. Being not merely left of centre in its political ideology but also left of field in its thinking, the idea seems to be to produce a list which is fresh and thought-provoking.

Sania fits the bill not merely because of her tennis. She is seen as someone who can “inspire a whole new generation of Indian girls to express their hopes and ambitions through sport”.

In his article on Sania, Jason Cowley (editor of the Observer Sport Monthly and Booker judge in the year Arundhati Roy won the award) writes about the “world-transforming potential of a young, attractive, articulate and media-smart teenage Muslim tennis star”.

But this being the New Statesman, the idea is to see Sania — and her sport — as a symbol of a bigger, more sociologically significant phenomenon.

“Can Mirza have a similarly transformative effect, not only in India but also throughout the world? She may not have won a major tournament, yet already she occupies a role through which flow many of the most significant intellectual and cultural currents of our times: the clash between secularism and political Islam, the emancipation of women in the Muslim world, the dominance of celebrity, the tyranny of the image, the emergence of India as a world power,” Cowley writes.