media coverage september 2012
DESCRIPTION
Contains one long article in the House and Home Section of the Wall Street Journal, and 5 articles covering the Magic Bus Gala 2012TRANSCRIPT
DNA AFTER HRS
Sep 16th, Sunday
In a charity event to alleviate poverty amongst children, celebrities were seen lending a hand for the cause. Karan
Johar was the host with Vir Das providing entertainment and Nita Ambani was the Chief Guest for the evening.
Celebs like Superna Motwane, Saurav Ganguly, Rashmi Uday Singh, Rahul Bose, Samantha Nayar, Bijal Meswani,
Bhavna with Chunky Pandey, Lara Dutta with Mahesh Bhupathi,Dino Morea, Vikas and Gayatri Oberoi, Madhoo
Shah, Ramona Narang, Ashok and Reena Wadhwa, Shalini and Samrat Zaveri, Lalit and Pooja Choudhary and Huma
Qureshi added sparkle to the event
Hindustan Time HT Cafe
SEP 16, Sunday
Charity organization Magic Bus, which works for the upliftment of poverty-stricken children, hosted its second
benefit show. The event aimed to raise funds for underpriviledged children. Karan Johar compered the event,
while Vir Das kept the audience entertained with his witty remarks. Nita Ambani was the chief guest at the
evening. Former Indian cricket captain Sourav Ganguly made a rare appearance. Lara Dutta, who has shunned the
limelight post-delivery, was accompanied by her husband Mahesh Bhupathi.
Read the article online on: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d5aae9be-0313-11e2-a484-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz294QR9gNu Matthew Spacie, the founder of Magic Bus, one of India’s largest charities, has a luxury that few in Mumbai share: a balcony with a view.
He lives in a 14th-floor apartment on Parel Tank Road, alongside Mumbai’s east-central harbour in
Sewri. Once home to textile mills, the industrial neighbourhood of Sewri is gradually transforming.
High-rise residential blocks have proliferated, competing for space with lower-income informal
settlements and government-sponsored housing projects. Chunks of the partly constructed Mumbai
Metro project, an elevated rail transportation system, are visible. Towards the east, the view extends
to the Arabian Sea, and Sewri’s famous mudflats, where migrating flamingos come to breed every year.
Sewri is an unlikely expat destination. Spacie moved to Mumbai in 1996 as a chief operating officer
for Cox and Kings. He had worked for the travel company for seven years after graduating in the UK.
Raised in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex, north-east of London, he travelled extensively with the company,
often going to the Middle East, before finally settling in India.
Although Spacie was relatively unfazed by the move, he admits that the “pre-monsoon heat and
monsoon humidity was overwhelming”. He initially rented apartments in regular expat haunts in south
Mumbai, including the more affluent neighbourhoods of Colaba, Breach Candy and Worli.
Sewri caught his attention when his wife, Ashima Narain, a photographer and film-maker whom he met
in Mumbai, began filming a documentary on migratory birds. “We were taken by the fact that there
were 20,000 pink flamingos in the bay,” he says. “I knew it would take years to rejuvenate [the area],
but it cuts down on my commute – my office is just down the road in Parel.” The slightly offbeat
location allowed the couple’s limited budget to go far: their four-bedroom duplex apartment spans
3,000 sq ft. A similar space would cost three times as much in the city’s more upmarket areas.
In 1999 Spacie founded Magic Bus, a charity that works with children and adolescents aged eight to 18,
and connects them with local community mentors through a weekly curriculum of sports activities.
“Mumbai’s visual dichotomy of incredible wealth and poverty had an impact on me,” he says. “I felt
irritated with myself for not doing anything after three years of expat life.”
Many charities in India look to fill the gaps in state-sponsored social welfare services by delivering
educational or health services themselves. Spacie, however, was unconvinced of their positive impact.
“I couldn’t understand the mismatch of resources and outcomes – why weren’t the kids I saw on the
street at school, when there were enough government schools?” he says.
The drive to start Magic Bus came when Spacie invited 30 young men off the street to play rugby
several times a week. Spacie, who played rugby regularly at the Bombay Gymkhana, an elite country
club, believed that sport could dramatically improve their lives. Instead of asking them to pay for
lessons, he requested that they serve as mentors to other local children.
“I saw these 30 boys’ lives being transformed, and it was them transforming their own lives, not me.
They stopped smoking, started looking at their careers, leading more successful, happier lives,” he
says. As the outreach programme expanded to several hundred children, Spacie resigned from his job
at Cox and Kings in 2002, to develop Magic Bus into a fully-fledged charity. It now delivers programmes
to more than 150,000 children in several states across India, with a target of reaching 1m children
within three years.
He speaks about the city in an optimistic yet unsentimental way. “Mumbai has given me a wife and this
wonderful purpose in my life, but it’s not always an easy place to do business. Being an international
person has a balancing effect of being good and bad,” he says. Spacie’s western background initially
led locals to think of Magic Bus as either generously funded or as an expensive operation, neither of
which are true, he says.
For Spacie, the advantage of living in India “is that it gives you access by virtue of who you are and
what you do, which you’d never get in a country like the UK, which is far less open. I’m three stops
away, or two contacts from anyone I want to speak to in India. If you are running an organisation, it
affords you tremendous privilege.”
Daily life, however, can be more challenging, and like many Mumbai residents, Spacie confesses to
having a “love-hate relationship” with the city. He has built many close friendships, yet “what’s been
very sad is that the quality of life has deteriorated, because of traffic and infrastructure. We don’t
have a major park. It’s ridiculous,” he says.
But Spacie also acknowledges that the city’s rapid transformation has its perks: the growing presence
of modern retailers, for example, has meant that essentials such as English mustard are now available.
There is also an expanding selection of bars and restaurants. Blue Frog, Mumbai’s leading live music
nightclub, with an eclectic line-up of local and international artists, is a personal favourite, says
Spacie.
Although he misses certain London rituals, such as after-work drinks at the pub with friends, Magic
Bus’s future expansion into Asia is a more pressing concern. “We’re becoming quite a large
development organisation, but it’s quite dangerous because a lot of developmental agencies won’t look
at us if we cover only one country,” says Spacie, who hopes that Magic Bus will one day have an impact
similar to other global non-profit organisations such as Save The Children and Unicef.
To make life in Mumbai more manageable, Spacie gets away when he can. Weekends are taken up with
mountain biking in the hills of Lonavala and Karjat, a few hours’ drive from Mumbai. And last summer
Spacie returned to the UK to become involved in the sporting event of the year: he ran through the
streets of Sutton, south London, in the Olympic torch relay.