Sania Mirza beats iPad
By Shalini Singh

My mother has stopped seeing her favourite afternoon soap operas on TV after the 24X7 media coverage of the real life drama of ex Pakistani cricket captain Shoaib Malik, ex wife Ayesha and future wife and tennis star Sania Mirza.  Cricket, broken hearts and love is an irresistible formula to draw eyeballs.

Shoaib is making it seem that he was conned into the relationship after fake pictures of a pretty girl were sent to him over the internet.  Whether this is a case of an internet relationship gone sour, the facts are that Shoaib did have a relationship with Ayesha.

How hot is the news in cricketing giants India and Pakistan?  Both have TV crews and print media stationed outside of houses of Shoaib, Ayesha and Sania.  Any development is flashed as breaking news on TV and online news sites.

The internet is not far behind.  Twitter, Orkut and Facebook are buzzing with news and views.

But it seems that even non cricket playing countries like USA have been swept up by the news of a cricketer’s turbulent love life.  But how hot is it in USA?

Google, whose search engine dominates in USA, India and most of the world, keeps collecting statistics on what is being talked about on the internet in USA.  Google Trends allows users to compare the world’s interest in their favorite topics.  Google’s Hot searchers allow you to ‘see a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time.’

Google Hot Topics is equally comprehensive and allows anyone to ‘see a snapshot of what people are saying, by viewing the topics with the most buzz in the news, on Twitter, FriendFeed, or on other similar sources’.

This morning (April 5, 2010),  Google Hot Topics (USA) was showing that Sania was No. 3 on their list of popular discussions.  Sania had even beaten the new Apple iPad which has made it to the cover of Time and Newsweek.   Shoaib was No. 6 on the American list and even he had created more buzz on the net for a short while than the iPad.

Both Sania and Shoaib have now dropped out of the Google Hot Topics list, but for a short while millions of American’s had their attention on the life of this couple holed up in her home in Hyderabad.