![]() Not only Saroo, but his Aussie parents, Sue and John as well, come off as wonderful, loving and caring parents and individuals. Otherwise, it is a happy resolution for Saroo. Sadly, Guddu, his eldest brother whom he adored as a child, was killed in an accident just on the same day that Saroo got lost 25 years before. He contacts them and gets the key info that there is a nearby village called Ganesh Talai - the 'Ginestlay' of 5-year-old Saroo! Saroo soon goes to India and reconnects with his birth family to the great delight of his elderly mother Kamala and his siblings Shekila and Kallu, who are now married with children. He notes that a nearby town is called Khandwa and that there is a Facebook group belonging to people from Khandwa. Gradually, over five years, with incredible patience and perseverance, Saroo, at age 30, using Google Earth's satellite images and Facebook, miraculously locates the train station with the identifying features of his childhood. His village 'Ginestlay' was somewhere nearby and that they were all reachable overnight by train from Calcutta. All he had to go by was that there was a train station whose name was something like 'Berampur', that it had a water tower, an overpass across the tracks and that the town had a fountain near a cinema. He starts working on trying to find where he was from by using the feeble memories of his childhood. However Saroo always wonders about his origins, with clear memories of his birth mother Kamala, his kid sister Shekila and elder brothers Kallu and Guddu, whom he looked up to as a child two decades before. Saroo is lovingly brought up by the Brierleys and he grows up into a happy and well-integrated Aussie over the next 20 years. After a couple of moths' futile effort, Mrs.Sood pronounces him 'lost' and organizes him to be adopted by Sue and John Brierley, a young couple from Tasmania, Australia. He also mistakenly says that he travelled just overnight by train when in reality he had travelled almost 24 hours to get to Calcutta. But all Saroo can tell was that he was from Ginestlay, which is what he remembered as his village's name. He ends up at a benevolent orphanage called ISSA, where the kindly Ms.Saroj Sood - tries to find his family and re-unite him. He gets off at the bustling, crowded Howrah train station and survives for six weeks in the intimidating bad and mean streets of Calcutta by his instincts and luck. Young Saroo, all of five, penniless and illiterate, does not even know the name of his village and knows little else about where he was from. It is the real-life story of Saroo, a five-year-old child in a village in central India, who gets lost and finds himself transported all the way east to Calcutta, some 1800 kms away. ![]() There is simply no other way to describe it. One day, after years of searching, he miraculously found what he was looking for and set off to find his family. Eventually, with the advent of Google Earth, he had the opportunity to look for the needle in a haystack he once called home and pore over satellite images for landmarks he might recognize or mathematical equations that might further narrow down the labyrinthine map of India. Despite his gratitude, Brierley always wondered about his origins. Unable to read or write or recall the name of his hometown or even his own last name, he survived alone for weeks on the rough streets of Calcutta before ultimately being transferred to an agency and adopted by a couple in Australia. It celebrates the importance of never letting go of what drives the human spirit: hope.Īt only five years old, Saroo Brierley got lost on a train in India. A Long Way Home is a moving, poignant, and inspirational true story of survival and triumph against incredible odds. To know who you are, you need to know where you come from.
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