In 1986, a five-year-old boy in India fell asleep on a railway station bench while waiting for his older brother. His brother never returned. The boy, thinking his brother might be inside, climbed into an empty train compartment to look for him. There, he fell asleep again. When he woke up, the doors were locked and the train was moving. The train didn’t stop for nearly two days. When it finally did, he had reached Kolkata — about 1,500 kilometers away from his home. He was so young that he didn’t know his full name, couldn’t read, and couldn’t even tell the name of his village. For several weeks, he wandered alone on the streets. He slept under railway station benches and survived on whatever little food he could find. Eventually, he was taken to an orphanage and declared a “missing child.” No one could figure out where he had come from After some time, a couple from Tasmania, Australia, adopted him. They gave him a loving home, and he began a new life. His name became Saroo Brierley, and he grew up on the other side of the world. But he never forgot his past. He had some faint memories — a bridge near a railway station, a water tower, the layout of his neighborhood, and the faces of his family. When he was about 25 years old, he learned about Google Earth. He estimated how far a train could have traveled and created a radius around Kolkata, then began searching towns along railway lines in that area. For weeks, he spent around 30 hours each week studying satellite images, trying to find something familiar. Even his Australian family didn’t know what he was doing — they thought he was just browsing the internet. Finally, in 2011, after years of effort, he found the place — a water tower, a bridge, and a ditch near the station. The location was Ganesh Talai area in the city of Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh. He zoomed in and recognized the streets where he had once walked as a child. He came to India and, wandering through the streets of that town, eventually reached his home. The door was closed, and he feared that everything might be lost. Then some people came out and took him to a woman. She was his mother. She had never stopped searching for her son for 25 years. After all those years, they stood face to face again He later learned that the brother he had been waiting for that night had died after being hit by a train. His mother had searched for both her sons for 25 years — she learned the truth about one, but never lost hope for the other. His story was later written in the book A Long Way Home, and it was adapted into the film Lion, which received six Oscar nominations

The turn was too tight... then the bridge tipped over. 😱