Ace against Odds by Sania Mirza

Author:Sania Mirza
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2016-06-09T18:30:00+00:00

22

THE CHARMINAR CONTROVERSY

IN DECEMBER 2007, Mahesh Bhupathi and I organized a camp in Bengaluru so we could train together during the off-season before we left for Australia. Rohan Bopanna joined us along with Purav Raja, a former national champion. We invited American coach Scott Davidoff and trainer Shayamal Vallabhjee from South Africa to help us in our programme.

Some of the junior kids who had been selected for the Apollo Tyres elite scheme at the Bhupathi Tennis Village chipped in as our hitting partners and together we comprised a serious, hard-working team. We would train and play tennis for about six hours a day, while the evenings were reserved for dinner at one of the fine restaurants in the Garden City. By 10.30 p.m. we were all ready to drop dead!

In the middle of the camp, I flew down to Hyderabad for a day to shoot for an interesting advertisement which would show me as one of the sports achievers of southern India. I was to be projected doing something unique, away from my vocation, while highlighting a prominent landmark of my beautiful city.

As I belonged to Hyderabad, the director planned to shoot me as an artist attempting to paint the Charminar while sitting in front of the famous historical monument. It was not a difficult shot but news of my presence in the Old City, where the Charminar is located, spread like wildfire and a big crowd gathered to get a glimpse of the action. Before we knew it, chaos had descended and the security men struggled to keep the thronging crowds around us under control.

The organizers of the shoot and the policemen who were present advised me to retreat for a while to an area adjoining the Mecca Masjid, which is located directly opposite the Charminar. I was guided into a zone that is not a part of the Masjid. It is a place where visitors or tourists (including women) can click pictures and they are allowed to enter without taking their shoes off. In other words, it does not come under the sanctified part of the mosque and film shootings are allowed in that area, with the requisite permits. We, of course, had no intention of shooting there, we were only looking for a peaceful spot away from the crowd.

As I sat there waiting for the next shot to be readied, a freelance photographer, inconspicuous in the big crowd that stood gazing, took a picture of me with the Mecca Masjid as the backdrop. This photograph then appeared in the local newspaper the next day along with an article that said I had been part of a shoot inside the sacred mosque.

The reporter had shown the photograph to a few influential people in the area and asked for their comments on my alleged ‘misuse of the religious monument for commercial purposes’. Needless to say, there were a couple of ill-informed opinions expressed by people who had been deliberately kept in the dark about the actual facts and these were then highlighted in the article.

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