What's the story?
Sony Yay of Sony Pictures Sports Network, WWE's broadcast partner in India, has conferred an award on Indian origin WWE Superstar Jinder Mahal.
Mahal took to his twitter account to break the news to his fans, saying that he was honoured and humbled to accept the award.
In case you didn’t know…
The 'Heroes Behind The Heroes' award was started by Sony Yay last year as a Teachers Day initiative, which is celebrated on September 5th annually in India. Tennis player Sania Mirza, Nobel laureate Kailash Satyarthi, filmmaker Subhash Ghai among others were conferred the award in 2017.
Jinder Mahal, real name Yuvraj Singh Dhesi, is a second generation wrestler after his uncle Gama Singh, and is currently signed to WWE's Raw brand. Starting off in FCW back in 2011, Mahal reached the zenith of his career last year when he became the WWE Champion at Backlash 2017.
The heart of the matter
After his incredible physical transformation, The Modern Day Maharaja received a huge push last year, and became the number one contender for the WWE Championship on an episode of SmackDown Live last year.
He went on to win the Championship from Randy Orton at Backlash. After an impressive 170-day reign with the title, he ended up dropping it to AJ Styles on an episode of SmackDown Live. In the Superstar Shake-up 2018, he was drafted to the red brand, and has stayed on in Raw ever since.
Though his Championship run was not very well received by the fans, The Maharaja continues to enjoy quite a fan following back in India, which was very apparent during WWE's tour of India earlier this year when he received a thunderous ovation from the New Delhi crowd.
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