One of the greatest joys in life is to return back home at the end of every taxing day. As people who are constantly thriving, we may not address the enormity of this blessing, but only those who don't have it, know how hurtful it is.?
Meet?Saroo Brierley, a boy who lost his mother in 1986, when he was just 5 years old.?
Now a businessman, Saroo grew up from the lowest levels of life. He was travelling with his older brother, working as a sweeper on India's trains. "It was late at night. We got off the train, and I was so tired that I just took a seat at a train station, and I ended up falling asleep."
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"I thought my brother would come back and wake me up but when I awoke he was nowhere to be seen. I saw a train in front of me and thought he must be on that train. So I decided to get on it and hoped that I would meet my brother."
He then found a spot on that train and slept, hoping that his brother would find him and wake him up. But his belief was wrecked 14 hours later, when he woke up and found himself on a moving train, without his brother.?
He had then reached Calcutta (now Kolata), India's third biggest city and notorious for its slums.?
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Hapless and alone, he started begging, because that was the only way for him to make a living, in a city all alone. A few years later, he was taken in by an orphanage, which put him up for adoption. and that's where he was adopted by the Brierleys, a couple from Tasmania.
"I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia."
But as he got older, his desire to go back home and meet his birth mother grew stronger and that's when he decided to go back home, but, even now, a huge barrier endured in between.?
As an illiterate, he didn't know about the place he had come from, and all he had was some vivid memories.?
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So he began using Google Earth to search for where he might have been born. "It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, 'Does this match?' And when you say, 'No', you keep on going and going and going."
With some maths, memories and logic, he was able to reach his destination.?
"I multiplied the time I was on the train, about 14 hours, with the speed of Indian trains and I came up with a rough distance, about 1,200km."
He drew a circle on a map with its centre in Calcutta, with its radius about the distance he thought he had travelled.?
Incredibly, he soon discovered what he was looking for: Khandwa. "When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up. I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play."
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"The last time I saw her she was 34 years old and a pretty lady, I had forgotten that age would get the better of her. But the facial structure was still there and I recognised her and I said, 'Yes, you are my mother.'?
"She grabbed my hand and took me to her house. She could not say anything to me. I think she was as numb as I was. She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost."
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An autobiographical account of his experiences, A Long Way Home, was published in 2014 and adapted into the 2016 film Lion, starring Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother and the slumdog millionaire fame?and Dev Patel as Saroo.