Inspired Clijsters completes mother of all comebacks

Kim Clijsters dropped down on her knees in disbelief, and then looked to the stands to find her golden-locked daughter, Jada, up way past her bedtime so she could see her mother spin a fairy tale.

Clijsters, the 26-year-old wildcard entry from Belgium who was a former No. 1 player, left the game two years ago to start a family and returned to tennis just one month ago. Suddenly on Sunday night, she had captured the 2009 US Open title by dispatching the 19-year-old Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark, 75 6-3, in 1 hour 33 minutes before an adoring crowd of 23,351 at Arthur Ashe Stadium.

Jada flashed on the giant screen in the stadium, pointing and hamming it up with the same infectious joy her mother had supplied to cap the most unexpected women's Open in memory, one marked by charming upsets, unsettling anger and disruptive rain.

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Amroha girl chose jeans, not burqa, joined Indian Space Research Organisation

Among the scores of families of ISRO scientists who woke up early on Wednesday, prayed and waited for the successful lift-off of Chandrayaan I, was one in Chaugori Mohalla, a tiny, traditional Muslim neighbourhood in UP’s Amroha.

Khushboo Mirza is just one of the 12 engineers of the Check-Out Division of Chandrayaan I which carried out the thermal, vacuum and assembling checks on each component of the satellite. But the story of the 23 year-old is inspiration for a village which once looked at her journey in shock and disbelief.

When her father died when she was seven, her mother, Farhat, broke norms to run the family’s petrol pump to keep her children in school. Her brother, Khushtar, a 2005 BTech from Jamia Millia Islamia, shelved his career ambitions to take charge later. To get out of the claustrophobic by lanes of Amroha, Khushboo applied for B Tech at Aligarh Muslim University. A volleyball player, she qualified through the sports quota. When she graduated, she landed a lucrative job with Adobe but gave it up to join ISRO two years ago.

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