In an age of technology, where technology lets you take a grasp above new heights it sometimes even help you in better way. This is what it happened for an Indian man who was separated from his family as a 5-year old. Saroo Brierley tells BBC magazine that he was accompanying his older brother on a train trip in 1986 when he fell asleep and awoke 14 hours later in the notorious slum of Calcutta.
At first, he lived on the streets, joining legions of children begging for their livelihood. Brierley would eventually be taken in by an orphanage and adopted by a couple in Australia. “I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia,” he told the publication.
But as the time passes by, the desire to know where he came from also grew. He started searching the Internet for clues. Brierley multiplied the 14 hours he knew he had been on the train by the average speed of trains in India to determine how far he traveled that night. He then drew a circle around Calcutta based on that radius and eventually determined that Khandwa was the town he was looking for.
“When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up,” he said. “I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play.” He would eventually make his way to Khandwa and locate a familiar house. His family had moved but he remembered their names. With the help of passers-by, Brierley was taken to the house where is mother lived.
At first he did not recognize his mother, who was stunned into silence by his reappearance. She took him by the hand into her house. “She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost.”
