![]() ![]() Actors Nicole Kidman and Sunny Pawar in a still from Lion. Brierley soon became obsessed with tracing train routes from Howrah to other parts of India. Later on, I began to use the application to locate the station where I’d boarded the train to Calcutta,” he says. “While I was developing it, I stumbled upon Google Earth and started mucking about with it. In 2010, Brierley began to work on a website for the family business. “It was a heavy weight to carry, always looking for closure,” he says. But all through the years, Brierley says, there remained an ache to go home. She did a lot to facilitate my transition,” says Brierley, who joined the family trade - a plumbing and lifting gear retail business - after graduation. She knew that she was adopting a child from a poverty-stricken background, somebody with psychological scars. “My mum was very attracted towards India. Sue and John Brierley, residents of Hobart, Tasmania, would welcome him into their lives. Little did he know that it was a train to Calcutta, more than 1,600 km away from Khandwa. Panicking, he boarded a train, assuming it would take him back home. But when the little boy awoke close to midnight, Guddu was nowhere to be found. When they reached Burhanpur, Brierley was tired and slept on a bench Guddu said he’d return shortly. Their mother was mostly away working as a bricklayer on construction sites and the father had abandoned his wife and four children. It was on a fateful day in 1987, when Brierley, then only five-years-old, and his older brother Guddu, boarded a train to Burhanpur from Khandwa. His miraculous discovery and his return home is now the subject of the Oscar-nominated motion picture, Lion. Based on his 2013 memoir, A Long Way Home, the film has been directed by Garth Davis, and stars Dev Patel as Brierley, Nicole Kidman as his adoptive mother Sue, Priyanka Bose as his biological mother Fatima, and newcomer Sunny Pawar as the young Saroo. Time stopped and the earth just stood still for me,” says Brierley, who shot to global fame in 2012, when newspapers reported the story of an Indian-Australian man who used Google Earth to find the Indian town he used to live in with his family, 25 years ago, from whom he had been separated from in an unfortunate series of events. But he would learn what his name really was, on a sunny February afternoon when a long journey home would end in front of a woman who was once his mother. It was the only bit of information he was sure of, when nothing remained of his old life in Ganesh Talai, Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. All his life, Saroo Brierley had been saying his name wrong. ![]()
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