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Taken for a cheap royal ride: Rajasthan Royals leave Ukranian cheerleaders high and dry

Rajasthan Royals leave Ukranian cheerleaders high and dry.

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That all the glitz and glamour in the Indian Premier League (IPL) comes at a price is cliché, but if that price is not paid to the ones who toil to entertain the audience, it surely leaves queries in your mind. The entertainers in this case are the team of Ukranian cheer leaders who shuffled their feet every time a Rajasthan Royals (RR) player hit the ball to the fence or took a wicket.     

Zeb Chaudhary, the director of Dansync Entertainment Pvt Ltd., the company that coordinated the supply of cheer leaders, said they are now embroiled in a battle which is not their own. “We are a small firm and we paid some of the girls from our own pocket; but paying everyone is not possible for us. The girls keep approaching us and we are left embarrassed. We do a lot of other events and we don’t want our name sullied,” said a concerned Chaudhary.    

The Ukrainian girls have been demanding the outstanding for 16 matches they performed in. Choudhary said it has become difficult to coordinate with RR since the IPL franchise has been coordinating through a Jaipur-based firm, 10/10 Inc. The contract drawn between Dansync and 10/10 booked nine girls for 16 matches for which a sum of Rs13 lakh was to be paid.  

According to Choudhary, 10/10 had told him that the final payment would be made on May 30. “I asked them to pay us on May 15 before the final performance at Hyderabad on May 17. Accordingly, Siddharth Sanghvi of 10/10 made the change on the contract and signed it,” claimed Choudhary. 

However, when the money did not come till the evening of May 15, Dansync said the girls would not fly to Hyderabad. After an assurance from 10/10 that payment will be made at Hyderabad pre-performance, the girls finally flew to that city on May 17. “There, my manager Kartik Ranwat kept pleading with 10/10 partner DJ Chiku for the money, but he was refused,” Zeb told dna

Among the girls who are still awaiting payment are Tetiana Stepanova, 26, alias Tashya and Tetiana Kharkychava, 23, alias Tasha. Tashya, who is from Kiev, said, “DJ Chiku threatened to get our baggage thrown out and our flight tickets back to Mumbai cancelled. But we challenged him to do it. We said: No money, no performance.”

The match started and RR manager (Operations), Rajeev Khanna, came to the green room, calmed tempers and mailed Choudhary at 9:04pm, saying: “Please rest assured all issues with 10/10 will be sorted. We guarantee the same.” 

The girls finally entered the stadium at the 15th over of the match. “Once that was over, Rajeev hasn’t been responding to my mails. But he tried to enter into another agreement for the girls to go to Kolkata. I said, first organise the payment for our previous performance,” said Choudhary.  

In an exchange of mail between Dansync and 10/10, the latter said that it withheld payment because several clauses of the contract were violated by Dansync. When contacted, Sanghvi said: “If we wanted, we could have withheld Rs6.5 lakh, but we have withheld only Rs1.5 lakh.”

Rajeev Khanna says it is between 10/10 and the girls. A despondent Tashya said: “It was bad that RR would not provide us food on long road trips, not give us water to drink, no umbrellas as we squatted behind the podium in the sun when it was 40 degrees... but this is really a blow.”

Tasha, her friend, quipped, “For a team, whose one of the owners could afford to lose crores of rupees in betting, isn’t it awfully petty that they have to rob poor girls like us of our hard earned money?” 

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