![]() If he was there, the breadwinner of the family, everyone would still be alive and you’d have a mum and dad and who knows, you’d be married by now with kids and all, and life would be different and we wouldn’t be having this conversation'. I’m just questioning and answering myself, but ‘aren’t you really angry at him because he left your mother and siblings to pretty much die and go through poverty and adversity. I don’t get asked this much –'would you ever wanna see your father again?' And the answer there is that I would like to see him again. But we always hope there are people more in touch in a humanitarian way, and who acknowledge that there are people less fortunate out there in the world. Do you find that attitude less common now, or more so, when you look at what’s happening in the world? Well, I can't comment on other countries and other people. The people you encountered, most of all the Brierleys, have all had a very open, inclusive attitude towards other ethnicities and cultures. I never saw anything, so I can’t comment on it. I don’t know whether I was living underneath a rock or something, but I was living in a multicultural atmosphere, a lot of international students. Even though I heard it in the media, there are always two sides to a story. (BCCL) (BCCL) When you were in the middle of your search for your hometown, from 2008 to 2010, there was a lot of angry discourse on racism against Indians in Australia – were you aware of that at the time? No, I was never aware of that (racism). I'm still so grounded and so regimented too, I’ve developed myself for such a long time – my characteristics and who I am – that if I try to change myself, my origins will pull me back. I don’t think it’s really affected us or has altered my mum or my dad in regards to becoming someone we’re not. For me, it’s like, I guess, an athlete that's been running every day to achieve, ultimately, the gold medal at the end. ![]() I don't think the fame affected (anything) in a detrimental way. From there, it just went viral when I came to Australia, and before I knew it, there was a heap of media attention – TV, magazines, newspapers – and extreme interest globally. The local policeman told the media in my hometown and it went viral – there were people from Delhi coming down, from Mumbai, Khandwa, relatives… so many people flocking in to get a piece of this amazing, profound story. Has this global fame affected you or your families in any way? The media attention started from the day I met my (Indian) mother – just an hour later, and for the next four days. For the past five years, you and your two families have been under a spotlight, starting from when you found your birth mother here in 2012. But the typical 'Tassie' also discusses how 'where you're from' is dividing people today, and what he hopes his story stands for, in a chat with DT. That's certainly a conversation starter with Saroo, who was at the Australian high commission in Delhi recently. He was reunited with his siblings too, except for his eldest brother, who’d passed away the night Saroo was lost. Almost a year later, he landed up at that tumbledown dwelling, and just as serendipitously as the rest of his life, found his birth mother living just a few metres away. Using his vivid memories, he followed the digital trail to Ganesh Talai in Khandwa, to the very room they lived in. Five years of obsessively poring over much of the Indian landscape later, he finally chanced upon Burhanpur, the railway station from where he’d boarded the train. It helped that his family, especially Sue, were extremely inclusive and open – they chose to adopt two Indian children despite having kids of her own – and when he was about 25, Saroo finally started looking for his Indian family using Google Earth. Saroo, which is how he mispronounced Sheru (hence the film’s name, Lion), stuck, and the boy grew up into a regular Aussie guy – except with very vivid and detailed memories of his childhood in India, including of the way his home and locality looked. Eventually, he was taken in by an orphanage, and from there, he was adopted by Sue and John Brierley of Hobart, Tasmania. ![]() Scared, lost and illiterate, he couldn’t communicate enough to ask for help, and somehow survived the streets of that city for months, dodging dangers like abuse and drugs, fighting poverty and starvation. Left alone, he boarded a train that took him to Kolkata. Their father had left their mother and started a family with his second wife. His by-now-famous story is that in 1986, Saroo was Sheru Munshi Khan, a five-year-old from a poor family in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh, out for the night at a nearby railway station with his older brother. But 'Lion' is a real-life story, and the man whom Dev portrays, the Australian Saroo Brierley, has been a global celebrity long before Hollywood happened to him.
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