At the end of the day, say what you will about technology. At least, sometimes, it helps an Indian boy find his mother, after years of separation, using satellite imagery of the earth.
The BBC has the remarkable story in full detail, but here are its brief outlines. Saroo Brierley was born in an Indian village, and when he was five years old, he made the mistake of his life. He was traveling with his brother, a sweeper on a train, and wound up falling asleep at a train station. Not seeing his brother, Saroo got on the next train he saw, and fell asleep again–awaking some 14 hours later in Calcutta. He became a street child there, was taken in by an orphanage, and considered himself lucky to be adopted, eventually, by a couple from Tasmania. This was making the best of a bad situation: “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 BBC.
As he grew older, he felt an intense desire to reunite with his birth family. The only problem? Since he had been only five and illiterate when he got lost, he couldn’t remember the name of his village. What he did remember were his village’s geographical features. So he began what must have seemed, to many, a fool’s errand: he began searching for the place on Google Earth. As he put it: “It was just like being Superman. You are able to go over and take a photo mentally and ask, ‘Does this match?’ And when you say, ‘No’, you keep on going and going and going.”
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