A long way home saroo brierley pdf movie#

And by the time the fourth person had come, they said, 'Just stay here for a sec,' and within 10 minutes they came back around and they said, 'Now I'm going to take you to your mother.'Īnd I couldn't believe it, because when I went around the corner, which was only 10, 15 meters around the corner, there three ladies standing in front of an entrance to a house. That went on quite a few times with other people that kept wanting to know this person that's a foreigner that's coming to a town that's never seen a foreigner. Another person comes in and I sort of spill my mantra to them as well. And I said to her, my name is Saroo and these are my family members' names. But lucky for me this lady came out of a doorway holding a baby, and she said, 'Can I help you?'. Putnam's SonsĪnd I just thought the worst, I thought perhaps everyone's gone, my whole family's died, they've passed away. Saroo Brierley was born in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, India, and currently lives in Hobart, Tasmania. Saroo had become lost on a train in India at the age of five.

He remembered landmarks, but since he didn't know his town's name, finding a small neighborhood in a vast country proved to be impossible. A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley When Saroo Brierley used Google Earth to find his long-lost home town half a world away, he made global headlines. There, he was adopted by an Australian family and flown to Tasmania.Īs he recounts in his new book, A Long Way Home, Brierley couldn't help but wonder about his hometown back in India. He lived on the streets, then in a juvenile home and, finally, in an orphanage. He was more than a thousand miles from his home, in a city where he did not speak the language. That train took him across the country to Kolkata (then called Calcutta), where he spent five harrowing months. 'It was just an impulse decision,' Brierley says, 'that, in fact, changed my destiny for life.' Finding himself alone, the 4-year-old decided his brother might be on the train he saw in front of him - so he hopped on. He took a nap in the station, and when he woke up, he couldn't see his brother. One day, Brierley tagged along to the next city down the rail line.

Brierley's older brothers would hop trains to nearby towns to search for scraps to eat. His mother was raising four children on her own, and they were constantly hungry. At 4 years old, he couldn't read: He didn't even know the name of his hometown. More than 25 years ago, Saroo Brierley was one of many poor children in rural India. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. I had the pleasure of listening to Saroo Brierly give a keynote address at RootsTech 2019 and because it was recorded, you can watch it if you missed the live stream.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title A Long Way Home Author Saroo Brierley In our world of DNA helping adoptees find their birth parents, this theme is recurring daily throughout the world. it speaks to the importance of family and knowing who we are. The book tells of miracles that put Saroo into the home of loving adopted parents and of miracles that guided him back to his birth mother and siblings. He finally used a resource that we might have all used in our research, just not to this extent: Google Earth.

He only had a few landmarks to go by and a childhood memory of a couple of place names that didn’t help him. I hadn’t watched “Lion” before I read the book and as a genealogist was curious how Saroo finally located his home.

A long way home saroo brierley pdf movie#

We’re reading Saroo’s story for our first quarter selection for the FamilyLocket Book Club on Goodreads and like so many instances, I found the book included details the movie could only hint at.