Mar 12th, 2017, 06:47 PM

A Personal Journey Back to India

By Caroline Thee
Image credit: The Weinstein Co./Mark Rogers
Dev Patel once again confronts the horrors still facing many children in India through his latest film, Lion.

Dev Patel has managed to make tears flow around the world, as per usual, since the recent international release of his latest film, Lion. Based on a true story, the film's heart-wrenching touch on topics like self-identity, acceptance, bloodlines, love, and being lost and found, has yet to leave a dry eye in the house. Similarly to Patel's first film, Slumdog Millionaire, Lion shows the harsh reality of many children in India that remain true today. While leaving most audiences astounded, Lion is striking a deeper chord with those who have personal ties to India, including myself, causing memories from the colorful country to flood back. 

The Film

Lion is the heroic true story of Saroo Brierley's journey to find his birth family in India through the use of Google Earth. The film begins with Saroo as a young child in India, played by the charming Sunny Pawar. One night while working in the train station, Saroo becomes disoriented and loses his older brother, Gudu. While searching for Gudu on an empty train, the train suddenly departs the deserted station with only Saroo on board. The train goes for days without stopping, landing hundreds of miles away in Calcutta. When a stranger tries to help Saroo find his way back home, the despaired boy is unable to tell the stranger the name of the town he came from, because he doesn't actually know the name of his home. Finally, Saroo ends up in the foster care system and is adopted by a sweet couple from Australia, played by Nicole Kidman and David Wenham.

   

Video credit: IMDB

When you think the tear-jerking rollercoaster during the first hour of the movie has finally passed, the second half is filled with Saroo's emotional journey as an adult trying to piece together the few vague memories from his childhood. By calculating the speed of the train with the number of days he was trapped on it, he creates an appropriate radius from Calcutta and follows all the train lines on Google Earth to find wherever the town is that he came from. 

Personal Journeys 

This film has touched me to my core, mostly because India has captured my heart ever since I first stepped off the plane in Delhi a little over a year ago. It continues to be a country and culture so colorful, beautiful, and yet still so undoubtedly in my face like no other. After a week of living with a loving host family in Delhi and being shuffled around as a tourist to see iconic sites, such as India Gate and of course Taj Mahal, I moved an hour outside of the bustling capital city to Faridabad.

The town of Faridabad has about 46% of its population living in slums, coming in second to Mumbai, which has about 54% of its population residing in slums. Believe it or not, this is actually why I came here. I came to Faridabad to teach English at a primary school in a nearby slum about a 15-minute walk from my home stay. While I hold countless memories from teaching my students who were so inexplicably wild but loving, to exploring India with fellow teachers, one of my more prominent memories from my almost three-month-long stay is from a pair of children I never even got the chance to know.  

 

My walk to the primary school every day in Faridabad, India. Image credit: Walking Lightly Travel

A few teachers and I were on our way into Delhi one afternoon when we got stuck in the smoggy city's infamous never-ending traffic. While we were stopped, a young boy and girl no more than eight years old came up to our windows begging us for money. We were short on rupees but we had a few chapatis (pancakes) our host mom, Mamta, had made us for breakfast that morning. We gave them to the kids, and to our surprise, they immediately handed them right back with a look of disappointment on their faces. We were in total shock. We insisted they keep them, which thankfully they did, but we couldn't fathom a reason a child so young would beg for anything other than for money to get food. 

Child beggars run by gangs and the mafia was first brought to my attention in Dev Patel's first award-winning film, Slumdog Millionaire. Patel played Jamal Malik, a young orphaned teenager from the streets of Mumbai who is one question away from winning India's game show equivalent of, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?  However, he gets arrested on grounds of cheating before he can even have his chance at the top prize. To prove his innocence and wealth of knowledge, the teenager recounts his troubled youth of losing his family and him and his brother's violent abductions by what is known today as the beggar's mafia. 

The orphanage where some of my students lived. Image credit: Walking Lightly Travel

Juliet Bevis, a visiting AUP student who spent 11 years of her childhood growing up in India (and also worked at a similar primary school in Faridabad) recounts, "Every day when I used to go to school, there was a lady who would sit outside with a child begging, but every so often the child would change. It happened the whole 11 years that I lived there. She was never pregnant and the children were a variety of ages. It didn't hit me until much later that what was happening was the exploitation of children who were taken or given away and forced into this work essentially in the hope that someone would give them money."

Image credit: Walking Lightly Travel

Dev Patel's cry for help: #LionHeart

The Indian NGO, Child Rights and You (CRY), states that, "every 8 minutes a child goes missing in India... kidnapping and abduction are the largest crimes against children in our country." With crimes against children in India on the rise, Lion's production team have started a new campaign headlined by Dev Patel, "#LionHeart." The campaign's main point is that, "over 80,000 children go missing in India each year," and is thus encouraging moviegoers to donate to partnered charities that help children in India and abroad: Magic Bus, Childline 1098, and Railway Children. The film also has other charities connected to the film such as UNICEF and The Indian Society for Sponsorship & Adoption

Bevis said that she, "saw Saroo in the faces of all the children I've seen in India," while I personally saw all of my students in Saroo. However, she believes that due to Dev Patel's successful films that accurately depict parts of life in India, "there is a real danger that people will only associate India with slums and violence and continue to think of it as a 'third world country' while not seeing the thriving, beautiful and welcoming India that I know and love."