The Persistence to Survive

The Persistence to Survive

Everyone is a child at some point in their lives; it is a part of everyone’s upbringing. Unfortunately, many children around the world do not grow up in a healthy and safe environment. For the many unlucky kids out there, they might have had to grow up a lot quicker than they should have had. Saroo Brierley at just five years old began living in a nightmare of many children after begging his brother Guddu to join him on a trip to Berhampur. After poor decision-making mixed with sleepiness, five-year-old Saroo found himself on a train heading a thousand miles away. Upon arrival in the dangerous and foreign city of Calcutta, Saroo was lost and did what he could to survive. Between using his instincts and judgment, Saroo managed to escape whatever dangers he faced and lived to tell his amazing story in his book A Long Way Home.

Saroo’s mentality towards his situation went through multiple stages as time went on. Initially upon realizing he was lost, he reacted the way a typical five-year-old who cannot find his mother reacts; he sat and cried. “Slowly, I found myself shrinking from enormity of what confronted me, hunching up into a protective ball. For long hours, I either cried or sat in a quiet daze.” (Brierly 2013). Here, Saroo was in his least-mature stage in his survival journey with no survival experience because he was only hours removed from being a happy child with people who loved him beside him. Saroo has yet to experience any real threat so his response to his situation was entirely based on emotion, rather than a combination of emotion and action. He was scared thinking of what had occurred to him and in contemplating whether he would ever see his mother or siblings ever again, the only response he had was to cry.

In the first few days after he gets lost, Saroo shows his resilience. He had no choice but to be resilient. Upon the train’s arrival in Calcutta, Saroo started to brainstorm on ways of returning home. He tried asking people from the crowd of thousands how he could get home, but he had no luck, as nobody he asked understood Hindi. “One thing I knew was that if a train had brought me to where I was, a train could take me back. I also knew that at home the trains on the track opposite the one you arrived on went back the other way. But I’d noticed that this station was the end of the line, where all the trains came in and stopped, and then chugged back the way they had come. If no one could tell me where the trains went, I would find out myself.” (Brierly 2013). Saroo knew he had to take matters into his own hands. He recalled from prior, yet limited knowledge on train platforms that if one side of the track has trains going one direction, the other track must have trains running the opposite way. Saroo would try this again and again with no success; however, in doing this, Saroo displayed how resilient he could be.

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