These kids are incredible...
Brett Lee
COURTESY OF BRETT LEE
It’s morning and a warm breeze blows up the squalid main street of Govandi, bringing with it the stench of Mumbai’s largest tip, Deonar. But there is something else in the air today. Excitement is building and, before long, a crowd of hundreds is jostling with the rubbish trucks in the street outside a humble shop front.
Inside, a fresh-faced blond man from Australia sits cross-legged on the floor with a group of children who live alongside the tip. Together, they are jamming on instruments and bantering effortlessly in Hindi.
This is the Brett Lee that India knows and loves. To Australia, he is a leading cricketer with a boy-next-door charm. To India, he is a hero. But today he is also a philanthropist and he is at Govandi as part of his new not-for-profit foundation, Mewsic, helping disadvantaged children throughout India.
The first project for his foundation has been a community music centre at the tip. The centre, stocked with donated instruments and run by paid tutors from the local community, offers singing and vocal groups, a dance program and instrument lessons for the children who work at the tip.
“These kids are incredible,” Lee says. “They pretty much have nothing in their little lives, yet they always have smiles on their faces and they look at me as this superhero. Their reaction to the centre was brilliant; they gave me a big hug and we sang and danced. It was a really emotional moment.
“I didn’t want this to be about me and just putting my name to a charity. I wanted to be involved with the kids and thought it would be wonderful to bring some hope into their lives through music.”
Hope is a rare commodity at Deonar, which is a dumping ground for the rubbish of 22 million people. Many of the children at Deonar scour the tip each day in a desperate search for items to eat or sell.
“They are called rag-pickers,” Lee says. “And they spend their days sifting through the rubbish, grabbing handfuls of anything they think might be important.”
Those who don’t work at the tip are paid meagre wages to embroider clothes in the slums nearby. The narrow alleys are home to hundreds of small clothing factories, and the Indian law against child labour is non-existent. “There is a chain in India and these kids are at the bottom of it,” Lee says. “It is very sad to see and has a big impact on you the first time you visit.”
While not-for-profit organisations work to provide basic necessities to the poverty-stricken in India, Lee wants his foundation to offer a bright spot in the children’s lives and give them an opportunity to express themselves in nurturing environments.
“Music is a wonderful form of expression and hope,” he says. “I want the centres to be sanctuaries and to give the children a taste of what it’s like to be in a classroom, so this can be a stepping stone in their lives, a path to further education.”
Of course, Lee is not the first Australian cricketer to fall in love with India, and he’s not the first to offer support. Lee’s Australian Test skipper Steve Waugh in 2003 was named an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his charity work at an Indian orphanage.
Like Waugh, Lee’s desire to help the children of his “second home” is genuine and his scope is wide.
At least 10 music centres will open across Mumbai before the end of the year, with the second already open in India’s largest slum, Dharavi, where more than a million people cram into 173 hectares. “Another 25?centres are planned for other parts of the country in the next 12 months,” Lee says. “And I don’t see why we can’t have 100 of these centres around India.”
Up for a challenge: Brett Lee playing beach cricket in Goa.
COURTESY OF BRETT LEE
But the foundation’s plans do not end there. This year, it has joined forces with The Music Therapy Trust to work with young people who have suffered the trauma of war in the conflict state of Kashmir, where the rate of depression has escalated in people under the age of 25. Together, they are training locals in clinical music therapy.
Another project includes songwriting workshops for young people affected by prostitution, child labour and child marriage. With the help of the Australian-based organisation MusoMagic – founded by Chocolate Starfish frontman Adam Thompson – the workshops will encourage young people to express themselves by writing, choreographing and performing their own?songs.
The first workshop was held in September, when more than 100 children from the Dharavi music centre came together with Lee to pen and perform a song. This song has since been picked up as the campaign song for an initiative between PAN (People and Nature) India and international music channel Vh1.
“Music is such a powerful outlet,” Lee says. “You can tell your story and open up through music. It has helped me through many tough times in life, and I want disadvantaged kids to have the opportunity to heal and learn and grow from all that music can offer.”
For Lee, Mewsic is clearly a source of great pride. It’s an endeavour that has earned him the praise of the Australia India Business Council, which officially recognised his contribution to building relations between the countries at a dinner in New South Wales.
He has been involved in charitable work in India and Australia for more than a decade. He was the ambassador of Deakin University’s India research institute and helped work on its water filtration and sanitisation research program in the country.
Lee won many hearts in the cricketing world in 2004 when he escorted a 14-year-old cancer patient to the Allan Border Medal ceremony as part of his work with the Make a Wish Foundation.
He and his brother, Shane, also support the Adventist Development and Relief Agency. “I have so much in my life,” Lee says. “If I can do something for someone else, whether it’s just taking a minute to sign an autograph, then I will try to do it.”
A father of one, Lee sees Mewsic as his way of giving something back to the country that has embraced him as one of its own. With a speed befitting a pace bowler, he has become one of the most marketable figures in the world’s second-most populous country.
Already, he has been involved in a host of ventures there, ranging from modelling and a clothing line to a hit album and a Bollywood film role. And whether it’s being chanted at an Indian Premier League (IPL) match or screamed at by a mob whenever he appears on a crowded street, Lee’s name is on everyone’s lips.
But ever the modest, knockabout boy from Wollongong, Lee says any feeling of adoration is mutual. It’s an adoration that has brought him to the country more than 50 times in the past decade.
Hope for a better life: Children from Deonar tip, Mumbai.
COURTESY OF BRETT LEE
Lee’s love affair with India started in 1994, well before his Test debut in 1999, when he was asked to tour the country with the Australian under 19s.
“I was still living at mum and dad’s and had never even left the place where I was born,” he recalls. “Suddenly I found myself in this hot, hard, massive, crazy country, and all I could think was ‘amazing’. The feeling stayed with me long after I got back from that first visit.”
He is now a regular presence in the country and is often accompanied by his son, Preston, 5. Lee has rubbed shoulders with India’s rich and famous, including the likes of fellow cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and Bollywood actress Preity Zinta. But, he says, it is the overwhelming generosity and kindness of people from all walks of life that keeps him coming back.
This year, Lee played in the IPL with the Kolkata Knight Riders, and he has conducted bowling clinics for young people in Mumbai and Bangalore. And yet he chose music, rather than cricket, as the means to help marginalised children in the cricket-obsessed country. The reason, he says, is a fervent belief in the power of music to heal and empower.
Lee sees music as an “escape to a different world. It’s hard to explain what it means to me.
“When I’m on the cricket field in front of 60,000 screaming Indians, it’s a great feeling; it’s so energetic. But when I’m in front of a crowd playing music, it’s totally different. It’s like I found the missing part of the jigsaw. I may have had one of the worst days at cricket, but when I come home and start singing and playing music, I’m able to relax.”
Music has become an essential part of the cricketer’s life in recent years. His band, White Shoe Theory, toured India last year and he is renowned in the country for his chart-topping duet with music legend Asha Bhonsle.
“I like playing cricket, but I love music,” he admits. “If you took cricket out of my life I’d be sad. If you took music out of my life, I’d be devastated.”
Lee, who admits he finds watching cricket boring, talks a lot about his love of music in a new autobiography, My Life (Random House). In the book, he reveals his desire for a life beyond sport, and his passion for music and entertaining.
Growing up with two brothers, Lee says he was sports mad and played everything from cricket to soccer. It was his mother who filled the house with music. “My mother played the piano and we always had music in the house.
“I remember my brothers, friends and cousins and I would have singalongs around the piano,” he says. “My younger brother, Grant, played the piano and my older brother, Shane, bought an acoustic guitar. I felt like I was missing out so I bought a bass. That was it for me.”
Even Preston is showing an interest in music and has shunned the Wiggles for the Black Eyed Peas. “He loves it,” Lee says. “We always have music on. It’s an important part of our lives.”
Lee this week is in Melbourne on a book tour and will return in January for the T20 Big Bash League. And despite his stretched schedule and commitment never to spend more than a week away from home, he will make regular visits to India and his foundation’s music centres, which will be managed in his absence by a mascot, Binga (one of Lee’s nicknames), and Australian-owned philanthropy advisory group Innovaid.
“It’s my dream to come back to India regularly, go to the centres, play some music and have a laugh with the kids,” Lee says. “I really want to be involved, to spend time there and make sure the centres and all our other programs really are making a difference. If I can change just one person’s life through this, then I will sleep pretty soundly.”
» My Life by Brett Lee with James Knight
(Random House) is out now.
» www.mewsic.in
» www.brett-lee.net