![]() ![]() After a few weeks he passed away and we were all broken." ![]() "(Vikas Gupta) fell down and his body was paralyzed from (the neck) down. "Six years ago we were doing rehearsals and suddenly (an) incident happened," a member of the group said. Unbeatable, the stakes were even higher after they tragically lost a member in a stunt gone wrong. "Sometimes you have to start from zero again, and we're prepared to do that.For the acrobat dance group V. "You may win or achieve something great but that doesn't mean your life is set," says Bhoir. The group bounced back after that tragedy, and Bhoir is confident they'll bounce back after this one too. Their costumes have "Vikas" written on the back. They pay homage to Gupta whenever they perform. The dancers were devastated but refused to give up. In 2015, one of their co-founders, Vikas Gupta, suffered a fatal accident while practicing a stunt. V Unbeatable is no stranger to adversity. "Even after becoming an international artist, there's been no progress. Others have moved back to their villages with their families. One of the dancers, 18-year-old Suraj Soni, is selling vegetables on the streets of Mumbai to make ends meet. I'm scared that all our hard work over the years might go down the drain," the group's 28-year-old co-founder Om Prakash Chauhan says in the video. "My father is a tailor and my mother sells snacks outside the railway station but because of the lockdown both of them have lost their jobs," 17-year-old dancer Nikhil Patlekar says in a video posted by the group in May. Poor day laborers - including many of the dancers' parents - were hit the hardest. When India went under lockdown and shut down its economy, tens of millions of people lost their jobs. Meanwhile, there's plenty of reason for the dancers to worry. It keeps them busy, says Bhoir, and hopefully away from negative thoughts. Some of them have been making and uploading short dance videos on social media. To keep them engaged, Bhoir and other senior members of the team have been giving the dancers weekly quizzes about the history of hip-hop. "They keep asking me, when will things go back to normal? When can we start dancing again?" says Bhoir. Suburban trains in Mumbai are also only running for essential workers so the dancers can't travel for rehearsals.īhoir has spent the last few months fielding anxious calls from his younger teammates. The nationwide lockdown has now been partially eased but large gatherings are still banned and the dancers are not able to practice the human pyramids and group gymnastics that had wowed fans around the world. No one from the team has tested positive yet, says Bhoir. ![]() Most of the dancers and their families have been confined to their cramped, mostly one-room homes in the slums of northern Mumbai. Mumbai has reported nearly 150,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and more than 7000 deaths as of 2 September. ![]() The virus spread quickly through the city's slums, where physical distancing is next to impossible and sanitation is scarce. Mumbai, India's financial capital and the dancers' hometown, has been hit particularly hard. Its total caseload of about 4 million cases is the third highest in the world behind the U.S. India is recording around 80,000 fresh COVID-19 infections daily - the highest single-day tally in the world. ![]()
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