Saroo Brierley was separated from his family as a five year-old while he was travelling with his older brother in 1986 on train, he told the BBC.
He fell asleep and when he awoke 14 hours later, he was in Calcutta without his brother. What he didn't know until recently, was that his brother was found dead on the rail road tracks after they got separated a few months later.
After Brierley lost his family, he slept rough before being taken in by an orphanage and eventually being adopted by a couple in Australia.
"I accepted that I was lost and that I could not find my way back home, so I thought it was great that I was going to Australia," he told the BBC.
However, he had vivid memories of what the village he originally grew up in looked like and as he got older, Brierley wanted to find out where he came from and turned to the internet.
By calculating the number of hours he had been on the train away from his village, he started hunting for his village on Google Earth.
"When I found it, I zoomed down and bang, it just came up," he said. "I navigated it all the way from the waterfall where I used to play," he said.
Finally Brierley made the trip back to Khandwa, the Indian village, he believed was his home and with the help of local people – was taken to the house where his mother still lived.
"She had a bit of trouble grasping that her son, after 25 years, had just reappeared like a ghost," he said of their reunion via Google Earth.
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