It takes is a touch of magic to change lives
Spacie was also playing rugby on weekends at the Bombay Gym and there was always a bunch of young men watching. “I was looking for a way to make a difference. I had reached out to lots of NGOs and tried different ways but it always seemed to be about Us helping Them
Matthew Spacie was a teenager when on a December night tonnes of methyl isocyanate spilled into the air from the Union Carbide plant killing thousands and leaving hundreds of thousands of others affected. It was a major industrial disaster and in the mind of a British teenager, a turning point.
“I didn’t know what I could do. I didn’t know anything about India but a couple of years later, I caught an Afghan Air flight and landed in India.”
He had a contact in India, a man affected by the gas leak, a contact made in the pre-Internet time via ‘blue airmail letters’. But his first job was in Dharmasala where he was teaching English to Tibetan refugee children.
“But then someone decided that my skills would be better put to use in a monastery somewhere farther away from civilisation. They made me sign a contract saying I would stay for six months, which made me a little wary. And then someone warned me that I would be expected to follow the monastic life and get up at four am so I took the next train out to Calcutta and ended up working with Mother Teresa.”
There was a shortage of doctors so the young Spacie spent time drawing Xs on the backs of tubercular patients and injecting them with such antibiotics as were available. “In the afternoons, I stood behind those brothers, humbled by their commitment, handing out bandages as they tended to the leprosy-afflicted.”
With days left for university, he went back, finished his degree, and joined a travel company, which offered bespoke holidays to those who could afford them. The company sent Matthew to India where he ended up the Chief Operating Officer.
“It was a relentlessly competitive environment. Targets were set at 400 per cent growth, that kind of thing. So I worked all hours and India passed by in the morning as I drove to work and late at night.”
But Spacie was also playing rugby on weekends at the Bombay Gym and there was always a bunch of young men watching. “I was looking for a way to make a difference. I had reached out to lots of NGOs and tried different ways but it always seemed to be about Us helping Them. I didn’t want to be doing something that I didn’t enjoy myself and one day, out of nowhere, came the idea that I could teach these young men rugby.”
This is a sports-mad city but it is mad about certain sports. There must be a million cricket clubs in the city but there were only two, at best three rugby teams at this time. The young men off the street were a useful addition and the Bombay Gym tried its best to be as supportive as it could, given its clientele’s desire to see only its own kind of person.
The idea began to grow on him. Surely kids have the right to play, the right to the outdoors, the right to enjoy themselves, to compete, to learn how to abide by the rules and to think strategically and imaginatively, to understand an opponent’s weaknesses and to rely on a team-mate’s strengths.
“I told the original team members that I would come on the weekend to where they lived and work with them on their rugby but they would in turn have to pay me back by mentoring others in their community.”
Magic Bus was born when Matthew took the idea to scale.
“It began with a bus and me going to NGOs and saying, ‘Let me take a bunch of children out into the sun and the greenery and see what changes.’ Akanksha was one of the first to agree and we were off.”
Now Magic Bus is a huge non-profit, with 3000 full-time staff, and between three to five thousand community leaders, reaching 600,000 children annually. But it is the 85,000 young Indians who have found jobs in the grey-collar sector, in call centres and in hospitality for instance, who have made the transition from poverty that makes it all worthwhile.
Magic Bus now operates in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Nepal. A fifth operation will open shortly.
“For twenty-five dollars a year we can help a young person break free of poverty,” he says.
All because he turned his passion into his cause?
“Yes,” he says. “And that’s the idea behind my next project, Social Star. I believe Magic Bus could go to scale because of a multiplier effect. I want middle-class people to link up with the underprivileged and share their passion. It could be anything: public speaking, macramé, poetry, taekwondo, whatever. If you share a passion, you deepen your relationship with it, and you never run dry.”
(If you’d like to get in on the ground floor of Social Star, drop support@socialstar.com an email. Meanwhile walk your 10,000 steps every day and remember: Pyaar ki raahon mein pyaara safar, hum kho bhi jaaye to kya hai fikr?)
Stay updated with all the Breaking News and Latest News from Mumbai. Click here for comprehensive coverage of top Cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and more across India along with Stay informed on the latest happenings in World News.
Stay updated with all the Breaking News and Latest News from Mumbai. Click here for comprehensive coverage of top Cities including Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, and more across India along with Stay informed on the latest happenings in World News.