Saroo Brierley: Two Different Stories
60 Minutes Australia, above
CBS 60 Minutes aired the fascinating story of Saroo Brierley, who at the age of 5, was a child beggar. Looking for his brother, who was out of sight after waking up from a nap on bench, he climbed on to a train looking for his brother in India, and ended up in the city of Calcutta, a foreign place to him where people spoke a different language. Without knowing his last name or the city of residence, and afraid of police because they didn’t take kindly to beggars, Saroo tried to survive on the streets until someone brought him to an orphanage. Eventually, Saroo got adopted by an Australian family at the age of six.
By age 19, Saroo never forgot his birth family and images from his childhood. He was determined to find out where he came from. So using Google earth, he traced all the tracks that ran out of Calcutta looking for landmarks he remembered such as damn, water tower and the station where he used to go. After six years, Saboo finally found his home, and reunited with his mother and siblings, only to find the brother he was begging with that day was hit and killed by a train.
What is interesting, however, is if you saw the American CBS 60 Minutes version, there are quite a few differences in the story told by the Australian 60 Minutes.
In the American version, Saroo ended up on a train car all alone for what he said seemed like 24 hours. In the Australian version, they showed him in a train car with other passengers and never mentioned him being “alone”.
In the U.S. version, Saroo goes back to his homeland, and when he arrives in his home city, he recognizes it right away. In the Australian version, he doesn’t immediately recognize it, even doubts if he is in the correct place, but he does eventually find his way home.
In the U.S. story, his childhood home is abandoned. In the Australian version, his childhood home is in rumble.
In the U.S. version, “a man approached who spoke English. Saroo said he was looking for the family that had lived in this house. The man told Saroo to come with him.”
In the Australian version, a man recognizes him from his childhood photograph and leads him to his mum.
Why the dramatic variances on a story if the story is true? Something is off here….
Things that make you go hmmmmm.
Why the differences? I think that those in control of the media in the United States want their viewers to have a skewed (biased and misleading) perspective of reality. 🙁 I’ve noticed that the mentality of people that don’t guard themselves against the constant intrusion of social media into their daily lives think differently than those who spend little or no time interacting with it. I often have to take breaks from the news and social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. in order to return to a state of critical thinking that’s NOT tainted by what someone else said. I’m more likely to believe the version regarding Saroo that isn’t dripping with sappy, Pollyanna-type happenstances.
I’m not sure I agree that this explains different “reports”.
Since the Australian version is less accurate, going by Saroo’s account in his autobiography, there’s no need to claim purity of Australian media and how the American version must be skewed.
Per his autobiography, Saroo was alone in the train car, making the American version accurate.
Both versions are accurate about the hometown: he was pretty sure this was the place and he was recognizing places, but he was also constantly having self-doubts.
His childhood home was abandoned and no longer in a livable state. The Australian version is overly dramatic calling it a rumble, since the home was still standing.
American version is more accurate about the man as well. Per his autobiography, “a man approached who spoke English. Saroo said he was looking for the family that had lived in this house.” He told his mother’s name, his siblings’ names, and told him that he got lost when he was a boy. The man told him to wait for a minute. Then he came back and “told Saroo to come with him.” Saroo did have childhood photos with him, but the autobiography does not state that the man recognized him from the photos. It does state that he recognized his mother’s name.
I can explain most things, and most of it is innocent. First is we don’t necessarily process information that conforms to reality. The best example I can think of is Michelle Fields if you look up what happened to her and what she said happened to her. She didn’t lie, but most people who describe what happened on the tape wouldn’t describe it anywhere close to what Michelle did. The second is we are not very good at storage information. There was an interesting study that showed people looking at Disneyland ads with a cardboard cutout of Bugs Bunny in the room, and they later remembered Bugs Bunny in the ad. People that were exposed to a fake Bugs Bunny + Disneyland ad were asked about childhood Disneyland experiences, and they remember Bugs Bunny. When pressed for details they even… I wouldn’t say they made them up, but their mind created them and they thought they were real (shaking hands, touching the tail, ect). So not only are eye witness accounts not reliable and our memory not reliable, these things are exponentially true about things we think we remember at age 5.
The other big thing is just production. They are more interested in creating a compelling story than getting every last detail correct. So with that said I’ll put in another comment exactly why I think both stories are consistent.
Train – Both producers tell their guys “we need footage of a him as a kid getting on a train”. The US crew assumes a cargo train, the Australian crew assumes a passenger train.
Recognizing the city – There’s no way he can have any certainty, he probably said something like “I recognize this and that, but I couldn’t be sure, I hope I’m in the right place”, or “at first I thought it was the wrong place, but then I saw X and immediately knew”. Both productions can be right.
Rubble vs abandoned – “I arrived to where my home was and found nothing but abandoned houses and building”. You can take that type of statement either way.
The man recognized him – Both versions are actually consistent with each other, one didn’t mention the photograph of him as a kid and the other didn’t mention the man speaking english. It’s also worth noting he probably sticks out like a sore thumb, and any english would be broken english.
Now what I think – it’s very possible that he did not find his home town. I did a quick search on him, and he said he remembers sleeping for 12 hours. There’s no way you can remember how long you slept, especially at age 5. The things he remembers about the town he retrofitted to what was on Google Earth. Uncertainty became certainty, fuzziness became clear. When he got there word spread quickly about why he was there. Another woman who lost a son around the same time found him. I wouldn’t be surprised if her son’s body was found on the train track way back then, and she was so happy at the thought he might have returned that no one says anything even though they no it’s false. As far as I know there was never any blood or DNA tests done, and by now everyone is so emotionally invested it wouldn’t be worth doing.
Be careful you don’t talk yourself out of being lied to! This is dangerous territory if you ask me to do this…
While I agree that a DNA test would be nice, there is a lot of details in Saroo’s autobiography that, to me, rule out the possibility of this being “another woman” and not his mother.
1) Saroo, since he was a child, told family and friends in Australia the names of two towns (his home town and the town he got lost from) connected by railroad. How many other pair of towns would have similarly sounding names? A few.
2) Since he was a child, he’s been telling people of specific land marks in town – of those similar sounding pairs of towns, how many would have those landmarks? A lot fewer.
3) When he got to the town, he walked by himself, based on his recollection, to the building that he recognized as his childhood home. If this was a different town, what are the chances that the woman that lived in that home had also lost a similarly aged son similar number years ago? That would be quite the coincidence.
4) Saroo gave the names of his mother and siblings. If this was a different woman, what are the chances that her name and that of her four children would all match up with Saroo’s account?
5) Many other small details. If this was a different woman, what are the chances that her first & third son would go missing together? That the father was a Muslim and mother wasn’t? That father abandoned family for second wife? Etc.
To me, there are too many details that line-up for this woman to be just “another woman who lost a son”.
Obviously, I base this on nothing scientific, but looking at Images of
him in a google search make me think he’s playing a character in a story
meant to sell books … like the The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven that
turned out to be a hoax. My brother in law believed it BOTH before AND
AFTER the truth came out. What can ya do.
Also, given EFL’s track record, I’m more inclined to suspect something as well, rather than trying to rationalize it away as ambivalence about eye witness testimony, news production anomalies, foggy memory, or anything else in an attempt to want to believe this tear jerker.
I mean how ridiculous, Saroo wakes from a nap, and instead of searching thoroughly within the vicinity, instead “embarks on a journey” (ever heard that before?) on a train (ironically the very instrument of his brother’s death) to a “foreign land” (oooo, nice touch) (Calcutta) to search for his brother in a country of a billion people instead of looking underneath the park bench where he had been sleeping and they had been begging.
Pah-lease. This sounds like such a fairy-tale already, I can barely stand it.
I’m just surprised he didn’t encounter a Cyclopes, and wasn’t guided to Calcutta by a shining star.
Calcutta police kibosh beggars? C’mon. Mother’s chop off limbs of children to make them better beggars, and people hire kids for RS 100 to beg for them.
Here is my problem….I just finished reading the book. It said that his older brother, Guddu, was 14 when he was hit by a train and killed…the same night that Saroo went missing at the age of 5. However, there is another part in the book, where he is talking about his childhood and he says that his mum was pregnant with Shakila and he was about 3 years old. Then he puts in parenthesis (Kullu 6, Guddu 9). All of a sudden, his older brother is only 6 years older than him??? The difference between 5 and 14 is 9 years, not 6. So, either Guddu died at 11 or Saroo wasn’t 5 when he got lost. I am leaning toward the latter. In the book there are many things that he remembers as a very small child. He said when Guddu was 10, he worked at a restaurant and made x amount. If Guddu was 10, you were supposedly 1. How would you know that stuff? However, you might if you were really 4 when Guddu was 10. Look at the pictures…he was a very tall 5 year old. The boy who played him in the movie was 6 when it was filmed and Saroo was much taller at 5? How did he know he was 5 if he didn’t even know his own birthday?? Don’t get me wrong, I Love this story. I saw the movie 2x, balled both times. Read the book in 3 days. But something is off and it’s driving me nuts.
I was more interested to learn if his brother died before or after he boarded the train. Did his brother die searching for him or was Saroo truly abandoned because his brother had died and he went looking for him on a train… Can’t find the answer…
You can’t find the answer because the family doesn’t know. Per Saroo’s autobiography, this is a question that he desperately wants answered but accepts that it’ll remain a mystery.
Are there other cases like this one. A lost child finding his home after many years?