Today, Saroo Brierley writes memoirs and delivers keynote presentations, promising that those who hear him speak “will be left inspired.” This confidence likely stems from his own profound journey of love, loss, and reunion. In 1986, at just 5 years old, a tragic accident separated him from his family in India. He didn’t reunite with them until he discovered Google Earth. After 25 long years, he finally found what he’d been searching for—home.
Image Source: Author Saroo Brierley at Gotham Hall on May 4, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by J. Countess/Getty Images)
“When I was five years old, I wandered onto an empty train somewhere in India and fell asleep waiting for my brother,” Saroo told Google in an interview, and continued, “When I woke up, I stepped off the train with no idea of how to get back.” He had stepped onto a freight train with his brother Guddu to steal coal and trade it for milk and food so that his family could have something to eat. Now lost, he jumped out of the train, and found himself hundreds of miles away from his home, amid the crowded streets of Kolkata, then Calcutta.
Representative Image Source: Rickshaws pass as poor people queue for food in the early morning in Calcutta, India. (Photo by Tim Graham/Getty Images)
"The panic set in," Saroo told People. To wake up and find himself hungry, moving towards the unknown, made tears roll down his cheeks, both tears of fear and tears of plight, "I was crying for my mom and my brother and my sister."
Two years later, he was eventually placed in an orphanage where an Australian couple named Brierleys adopted him. “I described a map of my hometown to my Australian parents who eventually adopted me,” he told Google. His new parents, Sue and John Brierley were more than happy to receive him in their family.
Image Source: Saroo Brierley and Sue Brierley attend the Build series to discuss "Lion" at Build Studio on February 8, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Jim Spellman/WireImage)
"Saroo's arrival was a kind of birth into our family," Sue told People, "It was just a fantastic moment, filled with love and joy." They gave him some chocolates, a book, and a stuffed koala toy, which Saroo named “Koala Dundee.” All was perfect, except that his past didn’t stop haunting him.
“But it wasn’t until 25 years later, that I heard about a tool that might help.” He was referring to Google Earth, a geo-mapping and tagging program that uses composite imagery to form a comprehensive, interactive map of the Earth.
Representative Image Source: A visitor looks at a 3D rendering of planet Earth while using Google Earth at Google offices in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)
“I began the search for the family I’d lost undeterred by the reality of what I was trying to do,” he said, adding that he needed to scour through a whopping country of more than a billion to find a family of four. Plus, he needed to scan nearly 41,000 miles of track and 10,000 stations, which was akin to looking for a needle in a haystack.
“Starting with the first thing I knew I got off the train at Howrah station, Kolkata. I thought about how long I was on board and worked out my search radius,” he did some math work. He had to examine a vast area. From this area, he kept deducting tinier chunks of areas based on his memories of his hometown. Firstly, he crossed out Bangladesh as he didn’t speak Bangla. Then, he deduced that he wasn’t from a city because he remembered looking at the stars. He also ruled out the possibility of colder regions as he recollected living in warm climates during his childhood nights. “From there my only option was to follow the tracks that still remained,” he said.
Night after night, he obsessively pored through the maps, each day from 5 pm to 2 am for 3 years, totaling 9,855 hours, until the night he found something – a symbol of hope. A station. A water tower. An overpass. And a ring road. “It was the station where I fell asleep 25 years earlier,” he exclaimed. From 6213 miles away, he began to follow the path of his first home. "It was a surreal moment," he told People, "Inside, I was jumping with joy."
In February 2012, Saroo traveled to the central Indian city of Khandwa, with the support of his adoptive parents. As he wandered through the town, watching ragamuffins play with sticks, he soon came to a familiar place, where he could sense his childhood dusty smell, sounds of screeching brakes, people shouting, and the pitter-patter of feet. He had arrived in his hometown.
On February 12, 2012, after years of searching, Saroo finally reunited with his family. He stood in his little house hugging his birth mother, Fatima, whose eyes were welling with tears, "It was the most pivotal moment of my life,” he recalled.
After the heart-wrenching reunion, he penned a book titled “A Long Way Home,” describing his long journey from parting to reunion. He also co-authored the screenplay of the movie “Lion,” starring Dev Patel as “Saroo.” "He's so lovely," Dev Patel was quoted as saying by People, "We met in Australia, and he is so generous. Saroo's the epitome of just a fiercely driven young man. And he has an incredible memory, down to the eggs I ordered at that meal, the clothes I was wearing, everything. He remembers crystal-clear."
Other characters of the cast include Nicole Kidman, Priyanka Bose, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, David Wenham, Siddiqui, Tannishtha Chatterjee, and more stars from India. At the 70th BAFTA, the film won Best Adapted Screenplay and fetched Dev Patel the Best Supporting Actor award.
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.