The Incredibly True Story of Lion

Some of the critics have had a kind of “thing” with Google Earth being such a big part of the story of Lion, of how a young boy named Saroo Brierley who was lost on a train somewhere in India. He ends up at an orphanage and is eventually adopted by an Australian family, where he lives out his life until he starts to wonder about his mother. Actually, he doesn’t wonder, he frets and finds himself in great pain worrying about whether or not she is okay and how badly it must have hurt her to lose her son. So he sets about trying to find the place where he might have lived. Now, keep in mind without Google Earth he never would have been able to find her. We have a weird kind of love/hate relationship with the technology we depend on every day and the technology we hate being dependent upon. Saroo using Google ends up seeming like a product placement but as you can see from his appearance on 60 Minutes it was actually the way he found his mother.

I remember exactly who told me about Google for the first time. He said “you should try this new site Google.” It really was a magical thing – just one line to input a search. We were bedazzled. Up to that point we had bloated search engines that were loaded with so many other things because back then websites were supposed to be one stop shopping. But Google freed up the search and made it so simple it is now the whole internet, Google is. So this guy used it to find his mother and that’s a pretty cool thing.

Lion turns out to be one of the best films to see this year, I can promise you that. If it didn’t fit so well into the cynicism and entitlement from before the election, after the election there can be nothing so comforting and moving as this story.

Here is the video of the real life Saroo and his real life story.