Best Magazine Reads: Vanity Fair Features 5-Year-Old Boy Lost From His Family in India

I love magazines, so I love the app I'm subscribed to on my iPad called Next Issue. It allows me to keep up with about a dozen of some of the best glossies out there.

Last night, I was glued to an article in the November 2012 issue of Vanity Fair called A Home at the End of Google Earth. The accompanying video is also very compelling.

A 5-year-old Indian boy is riding a train with his older brother. He falls asleep and realizes his brother is gone. He can't find him but assumes he'll be back. He falls asleep again and wakes up many hours later. His brother is still gone.

The train has ended up in Calcutta and the boy hadn't really known much of anything about where he was from. He wanders around the city and escapes at least one risky situation before heading back to sleep at the train station.

Soon he lands in government custody and is adopted by a loving couple from Tasmania. He lives there for many years, adjusting to life thousands of miles southeast of India. But finally, one day in his 20s, he has an inspiration to see if he can retrace the steps of his journey away from his birth family. He starts using Google Maps.

It is four years later when, after many sleepless nights scanning the web site in the dark, he thinks he might have found his home. He flies to India and is reunited with his mother, younger sister, and lots of other relatives. He discovers that his brother had died on some train tracks not long after being separated from his little brother. His mother had searched for the boys, but a fortune teller told her she would be reunited with the boy someday, so she ended her search and hoped for the best.

A truly inspiring and amazing story, and one that is not surprisingly being turned into a movie.

***** out of ***** stars

Meet Anoop Singh, Our Favorite Cab Driver in Durban

I referred to him in the last blog, as the guy who took us to our safari three hours northeast of Durban, South Africa and even accompanied us on two of our three treks into the bush. But his own story is deserving in its own right.

Anoop Singh (pictured on our boat safari of the St. Lucia Estuary, with my colleague Matt Barrett) was driving some passengers in his minivan about 10 years ago when he was shot in the shoulder and robbed. He lost so much blood that he should have died. He suffered extensive nerve damage, went on morphine for three months, and still has limited use of his disfigured left arm and hand.

He says a preacher healed him and he was able to stop taking the morphine. Although he never drank or smoked, he became born again and cleansed himself of any vices, including gambling. Two days after he was born again, he says his assailant was shot dead.

On another occasion, Anoop suffered a rare eye disease and went blind for 10 days. At least that’s what his doctor said, but he thought it was from straining his eyes from driving too much.

With Singh, the stories kept coming. He claims his first ancestor to immigrate to South Africa, in 1860, had two wives and worked in the sugar fields. After five years of working, the family was given the option of going back to India or getting a piece of the land they had worked on. They chose the latter. He said his family in South Africa now consists of 930 people, and many of them work in the transport sector.

The only one I was really wary of was his claim of being related to Ghandi. Isn’t it a myth that every Indian says he's related to Ghandi, or something like that? Nevertheless, he said Ghandi’s granddaughter, Ela Ghandi, was married to his “granny’s brother," which at least seems pretty feasible.