Lion (Movie)

  This was an absolutely amazing and touching film. I highly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to watch something touching and real. This film is based on a true story which makes it more incredible to me. The story starts back in 1986 in India. A five year old boy named Saroo is fairly happy with his life despite the dismal conditions at the time. He is extremely close with his older brother Guddu and often helps in taking care of his younger sister and mother. Guddu and Saroo often go to steal coal from the freight trains to trade for milk and food for the family. One night, Guddu goes off to look for a job and Saroo insists on going along. However, upon reaching the nearby train station, Saroo decides to stay behind and take a nap. Thus, Guddu tells him to stay where he is and that he'll be back for him. When Saroo wakes up, the train station is empty and his brother was still not back. Saroo looks for Guddu and eventually boards a train and falls asleep in one of the compartments. When he wakes up, the train was already heading toward its next destination with no way for Saroo to get off. 

        After a few days, he arrives in Calcutta. Without knowing his surname, his mother's name, or the correct name of the location where his family is located, Saroo is lost. For a while he wanders about not able to communicate with anyone for help because he spoke Hindi and the people in Calcutta spoke Bengali. In the following days, Saroo encounters many different experiences and dangerous situations. Eventually Saroo goes to the police station and after being unable to trace his family, he is put in an orphanage. Saroo eventually is adopted by an Australian couple. The couple treats Saroo extremely well and eventually adopted another child named Mantosh, who struggled to adapt to his new home. 

          Twenty years pass and Saroo is now a young man who is heading to Melbourne to study hotel management. He has forgotten a lot about his past and his culture over the years and is an extremely happy and healthy male. During a meal with some Indian friends, he came across a delicacy called jalebi. This sparked a childhood memory that he shared with his brother and confides to his friends about the story of how he was lost and then adopted. His friends suggest that he use Google Earth to look for his hometown and to find his family again. With that, Saroo dives into searching for his past and disconnects himself from the people around him as he focuses on the past and how much his family must have grieved for him.

        After years of fruitlessly searching for his hometown by following the train tracks, Saroo comes across a familiar rocky landscape where his mother used to work. From there he finds the water tank and the roads from his childhood memory until he found his hometown Ganesh Talai (which Saroo had been pronouncing Ganastalay the entire time). He eventually returns to his hometown and is reunited with his family but learned that Guddu had been killed by a train the same night that Saroo got lost. The film ends in a warm reunion with his family and also segments of the actual people arriving in Ganesh Talai. It was also during that reunion did Saroo learn that he had been mispronouncing his own name growing up and that his name was actually Sheru meaning "Lion."