Movie: Lion UPDATED

I saw this movie over the weekend. It is very good! It portrays the true story of a 5-year-old Indian boy who gets lost on a train. He tries to tell everyone where he is from, but they cannot find his mother. He gets adopted by an Australian couple. He grows up and does a Google Earth search to find his mother. It is adapted from a book A Long Way Home.

The film, directed by Garth Davis and written by Luke Davies, recently nabbed four Golden Globes nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for Dev Patel, Best Supporting Actress for Nicole Kidman, and Best Motion Picture – Drama.

Here is the trailer: Lion.

REFORM Puzzle Piece

Update:“”Never give up, no, never give up.” These lines from the movie ‘Lion’ ring in the hearts of Stephanie Kripa Cooper-Lewter and Rebecca Nirmala Peacock, two Indian women who were abandoned soon after birth and adopted by US-based couples. More than 40 years later, the two have returned to India in search of their biological parents.

Like Saroo Brierley, the protagonist in the award-winning ‘Lion’ who gets to meet his biological mother after an agonizing wait of 25 years in Australia, both Kripa and Nirmala, who met on Yahoo in 2007, long to trace their parents back home in India.

In the summer of 1975, Kripa was adopted from a Kanpur-based orphanage by a single mother Mariyln Backstrom, hailing from Aitkin in Minnesota. Nirmala was also adopted from the same institution in 1976 by Leonard Jensen and Judi Jensen, a couple from Salt Lake city in Utah.

Talking to TOI, the women, who are now in Agra, said almost in unison, “We want to trace our roots. We want to meet our parents, talk to them, cry in their arms and know why they left us in that cradle outside the orphanage. We want to know their stories and why they had to give us up.”

Nirmala added: “I have been in the US for the last four decades, yet my heart longs for my home in India. My parents have been very supportive in my search for my biological roots.” A homemaker settled in Seattle along with her eight-year-old adopted daughter Trisha and graphic designer husband David Peacock, she says she’s not one to give up.

43 years after adoption, ‘Lion’ brings 2 Americans to India in search of biological parents

[Times of India 2/12/18 by Arvind Chauhan]