Meet Tatiana Nandha Kumar, an 18-year old girl with French and Malaysian heritage who enjoys eating food more than she lets on, has an immense passion for dancing (tap dancing in particular), and a strong desire to help out the underprivileged community in her home country as best as she can.
She also happens to be one of the youngest participants to ever be crowned Miss World Malaysia in her first ever pageant and is representing Malaysia as a whole for the upcoming finals to crown the next Miss World of 2016 this Sunday.
Yet unfortunately, she lacks support from her fellow Malaysians due to the minimal amount of publicity.
This isn’t too much of a surprise, considering Tatiana herself has mentioned on a Facebook post that she has yet to receive permission to post statuses and updates on the official Miss World Malaysia page.
This poses a big problem considering during the judging procedure, there is a Multimedia challenge set for contestants to win points from by interacting on their social media sites to create engagement with fans.
She unfortunately can’t complete this challenge since she does not have access.
Various complaints have been posted online from fellow loved ones and fans of Tatiana who have expressed their concern over the posts being shared on the official Miss World Malaysia page.
The admins of the page have also shared a few photo albums that contain pictures of other contestants from the Miss World 2016 pageant that are not related to Tatiana most of the time. This caused further outcry from netizens.
In fact, this has gone on until Tatiana’s father himself posted a comment expressing his frustration over the unfair treatment his daughter was receiving.
There have been also various remarks left by netizens on how Tatiana was not receiving the proper treatment a contestant participating in the Miss World pageant should be getting.
Her talent performance was at a disadvantage with her tap dancing on a carpet since there was no wooden platform prepared for her beforehand.
But even before she had gone off to Washington DC in the United States for the final round, Tatiana had already faced a problem when she couldn’t get an air flight ticket. Luckily this was solved with the help of Tourism Malaysia and her father.
This of course caused a lot of concerned comments to be left on Tatiana’s status update, with many wondering why she was using her own expenses and effort to obtain the flight ticket when it should be the responsibility of the National Director of the Miss World Malaysia Organisation to help organise these situations for her.
This caused many speculations regarding the National Director, Dato’ Anna Lin Mei Yoke, and her transparency with the whole ordeal as it was reported that she had flown off to England a week after the Miss Malaysia World pageant when Tatiana was required to be properly groomed and trained for the finals.
But of course there’s two sides to every story.
Dato’ Anna and other representatives have also shared their own side and revealed that not everything that is posted by Tatiana can be accepted with no doubts. The admins of the official page have also gone on to share their own thoughts and comments regarding the entire situation.
The image uploaded shows an alleged conversation happening between the admins with Tatiana who claimed that the post she had uploaded regarding her air flight ticket was done on the instructions of her father.
The admin further posted more proof for their side by showing a conversation they had with a travel agent that was in charge of handling the airline tickets for Tatiana.
As of now, Tatiana is currently listed as part of the top 25 candidates chosen by social media votes which shows that she is still getting support.
Right now it’s a case of he-said-she-said, so it’s hard to judge who’s in the wrong or if either parties are event telling the truth or the full story. However, it is sad to see an international contestant and competition marred by such bickering so publicly on social media.
At the end of the day, what’s truly suffering is our country’s reputation in the eyes of the world.
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Feature Image Credit: Compiled from thehive.asia and malaymailonline.com
