Man Finds His Mother 25 Years After He Went Missing Thanks To Google

A man, who was accidentally transported 1,000 miles from home in India when he was just six years old, has traced his mum 25 years later from Australia using Google Earth.

Lost, Saroo Brierley, whose story is now set to be featured in a new film, Lion, starring Nicole Kidman, charting his amazing life story.

Despite growing up in a loving family in Australia, he admits he spent years looking at maps and eventually at Google Earth for signs of the landmarks that he knew as a child.

And after recognising the village he was born in, Saroo traveled home – where he enjoyed an emotional reunion with his mother.

Saroo, who grew up in rural India, said that as a child he rarely had enough to eat and would often travel on trains in the area together with his brother but during one ill-fated trip in 1987, aged six, he had been dozing at a station with his brother and when he woke up he found that he was alone.

But the youngster, who dreamed of one day being reunited with his mother, said;

“I opened my eyes and couldn’t see my brother, but I saw a train in front of me with the door open and for some reason I thought he was on board.

“I think you could say that split-second decision changed my life forever.”

“I remembered landmarks, for example there was a waterfall where we used to play and the dam.

“But I didn’t know the city or town’s name and finding a small neighbourhood in a vast country proved to be nearly impossible.”
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, the first thing you’re gonna see before you come to your hometown is the river where you used to play with your brothers, and the waterfall, and the architecture of this particular place where you used to visit quite a lot.’ It has to be exactly the same, otherwise, if it’s not, I’d just fly over and go somewhere else.”

He said: “Everything just started to match. So I traced a road back that I would follow back as a child, and before I knew it I was looking at the suburb where I had grown up, and just on the right of it was the house I had grown up in. I couldn’t sleep for that whole night.”

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