Do Bigha Zameen AMIT SENGUPTA

I sell, therefore I am?

From 122 odd to 99. What do you say about a country and its mainline media which goes so mindlessly overboard on a girl who lost in the third round against Serena in a big game and won soon after in Hyderabad in a not so big game? Sania Mirza has become the queen of all she surveys and no one is asking why. Why? She is a typical case of a nation which looks at sudden, impossible miracles to boost its slow, shattered, battered ego. She is but a straw, and if she drowns (and why think negative thoughts really), she will be one more anti-catharsis for a nation which survives on artificially generated catharsis, with simulated hype: by the media, ad guys, agents and marketing whiz kids. Sania sells. At least that is what they think. Right now.

So that’s it. Sania is the new great gamble for the product industry. The brand. We have no options but to celebrate. Every morning she will give the entire nation what it doesn’t have: a morale boost at 99 when she could be 121.

This is the new philosophy of success in new, insatiable, get-rich India. Grab it, till it lasts. Pose ambition as nirvana but choose the right target. Irfan Pathan, Yuvraj Singh, Bipasha Basu. Don’t even touch Dhanraj Pillay or PT Usha or Bhaichung Bhutia. They don’t sell. Sushmita Sen is now out, despite her angst for orphaned children and Mother Teresa. Now, it’s all about Advantage Sania. She is visiting orphanages in Bengal. Good for her.

If she wants to become a David Beckham, she should watch Ronaldo or Zidane. If her role model is Steffi Graff, she should find out how many TV interviews Graff has given when she was on top. You can’t sell bicycles and orphans and become a superstar at 19, while you are still struggling between the 100s in the world rankings. Even in Ethiopia, the country of big runners, they will smile.

PT Usha missed it by the winkers in the Olympics; she walked all alone when she retired. No one cared. Did long jumper Anju George sell: how many TV ads did she get, despite being in the top World Five? And Dhanraj Pillay? Or Bhaichung Bhutia? Or all those who come from the hinterland, barefoot, with no English, no State support, no sponsorships, not even a T-shirt with a logo, who hang out on railway stations and cook their own food on the railway platforms and sleep on tired floors and make a queue for water in the mornings and go to filthy bathrooms and those who never had a foreign coach or endorsements: an entire nation of talent bursting through, proven talent, invisible talent, dead talent, condemned before they could even enter their name in this rat race.

That way, Sania’s agent should be given the Arjuna Award. And the ad guys who are unmaking her into a fantastic product with spectacles and jeans: what a great job they are doing! Ditto with sports journos and brand managers; especially those who turned her into an editor of a Sunday brand. Because the paper is not a paper. The paper is an impersonal commodity, a pseudo mint with a hole, a flavoured toothpaste: squeeze it, use it, chuck it. In the garbage can of history.