Story of man who found mom 25 years later using Google Earth to become movie

The youngster ended up on the streets after being separated from his family with police and authorities refusing to help until he was picked up by a charity that arranged for him to be adopted in Australia. Twenty-five years later as a university graduate and then a successful businessman, he set out on the journey to find his way home.

Work has already started on the film called 'Lion' starring "Slumdog Millionaire” actor Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman after the Winston Company purchased the rights to make the movie for $12 million at the Cannes Film Festival.

Like many people growing up in rural India, Saroo Brierley said that as a child he rarely had enough to eat and would often travel on trains in the area together with his brother. He said they were like the two brothers on the hit film "Slumdog Millionaire,” begging and riding on the train roof between stations.

But during one ill-fated trip he had been dozing at a station with his brother and when he woke up, he found that he was alone.

"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 onboard,” he said. "I ran over and jumped on the train just as the doors closed and it pulled out of the station and it was only then that I realized he wasn't there. I think you could say that split-second decision changed my life forever."

Unable to do much about the situation and alone he simply stayed on the train, making the 1,000-mile journey across the country and ending up in the northeastern city of Kolkata, where alone and without friends and not speaking the language, he became a beggar.

That was before somebody arranged for him to be rescued from the streets and put into a juvenile home and, from there, into an orphanage where he was adopted by an Australian couple — and ended up moving to Tasmania where he started a new life.

But he never gave up hope that he might one day get back to his roots despite growing up in a loving family in Australia, and he admits he spent years looking at maps and eventually at Google Earth for signs of the landmarks that he knew as a child.

"I traveled around a lot with my brothers so I had seen a lot of the area around the house. I remembered landmarks, for example there was a waterfall where we used to play and the dam,” he said. "But I didn't know the city or town's name, and finding a small neighborhood in a vast country proved to be nearly impossible."

He did not give up though, looking at the program's satellite images, zooming in and out of the map, exploring the Web of railway lines crisscrossing India.

"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,'” he said. "It has to be exactly the same, otherwise, if it's not, I'd just fly over and go somewhere else."

And then came the day he found the right place.

"I thought, 'On the right-hand side you should see the three-platform train station' — and there it was. 'And on the left-hand side you should see a big fountain' — and there it was,” 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."

It took months for a trip to be organized to test his theory and when he eventually arrived there, the hope almost ended after he found the house closed and locked up and nobody living there. He said he had also been shocked about how small the property in Khandwa, a small city in Madhya Pradesh, had seemed.

(nydailynews.com)