Mirza and Karthikeyan challenge India's cricket obsession

DELHI - She has been called India's equivalent of the Tiger Woods phenomenon. Everywhere she goes, she is mobbed by adoring fans - so much so that her mother had to intervene to ask for police protection.

In a single week, she was offered sponsorship deals from 18 different companies worth a total of almost $2.6m.

Not bad for someone whose greatest sporting achievement so far has been getting knocked out of the Australian Open tennis tournament in the third round, and who was still ranked No 134 in the world when all those sponsorship offers came in.

Yet Sania Mirza, India's 18-year-old tennis star, is labelled "the new icon of Indian sports". Already the Indian press is talking about "Sania mania".

It is the same for Narain Karthikeyan, India's first Formula One racing driver. Suddenly Karthikeyan's face is everywhere in India, plastered across billboards and popping up every few moments in television adverts.

Quite a profile, considering he has only just broken into Formula One, and finished 15th in his first race.

Mirza and Karthikeyan are being showered with the sort of attention only champions get in most other countries.

But if they both have a long way to go to prove themselves in their respective sports, in Indian terms they are both champions.

The degree of adulation Mirza and Karthikeyan are receiving is a measure of just how little success India has achieved in any sport outside cricket and, to a lesser extent, hockey, in recent decades.

At the Olympic Games last year, India, a country of more than a billion people, managed just one silver medal, in shooting.

And it was the first individual silver India had ever won. As the Games came to an end, and countries counted up their medal tallies, India's media was left plaintively asking how it was that a country with India's resources - the second-fastest growing economy on the planet - and sheer population size, could do so badly.

Now Indian sports fans are wondering if 2005 is the year all that is going to change, with not one but two bright new hopefuls on the horizon.

India has finally started to live up to its economic potential, after years of disappointments. Now Indians hope it may start living up to its sporting potential too.

Of the two it is Mirza who has captured the national imagination more completely - in large part because her arrival on the scene was so meteoric. Only six months ago, barely anyone had heard of her.

Then she managed to reach the third round of January's Australian Open on the back of a wild card entry - the best any Indian woman has ever done in a Grand Slam event.

Mirza also has time on her side. At just 18, she may have a lot yet to prove but she has time to prove it.

- INDEPENDENT