Self-Discovery: Finding Identity and Belonging

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Self-Discovery
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Self-Discovery
Anyone can be forced by circumstances to leave their homes for a better life in another
place. This could be out of personal convictions, an endeavor for self-development, or
involuntarily because of various socio-political conflicts. Regardless of the reason, moving away
from home at a tender age may make one lose focus of his own culture and background. No
matter how successful or accomplished one is, the idea of his origin and ways of life become a
constant reminder that a person is who he is pegged on the knowledge of his people and their
ways of life. In this essay, I shall use Stan Grant’s memoir Talking To My Country and Garth
Davis; Lion which is adopted from the non fictional book A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley,
to contextualize this important aspect of an individual’s identity and such for cultural belonging
In Taking To My Country, Grant shares a personal account of discrimination and racism,
and how he found an escape route through education. His journey as an international journalist
enabled him to cover issues relating to conflicts around the world and saw how they affected
societies and individual spirits, with everyone affected wishing for a family and a place to call
home.
On the other hand, Lion is a story of a boy named Saroo Brierley who boards a wrong
train that leads to his lost identity. At a tender age of five, Saroo ends up in the streets of
Calcutta, about 1000 miles from home and practically in the middle of nowhere. There he meets
many people who speak languages he never understands. Due to lack of identity in the form of
his second name or correct pronunciation of his home town, the boy ends up stranded in
Calcutta. He is surrounded by constant threats of police arrest and human traffickers until he is
adopted by a stable family. Twenty years later, he starts to look for the truth about himself and

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his roots. The two works in their own different ways deal with elements of identity crisis and a
deeply hidden desire for acceptance and belonging.
The family is the basic unit of society. It is the reflection of an individual’s wealth in
culture and a place of belonging. Thus, being separated from this basic unit of personal growth is
a recipe for social instability in an individual’s life. The situation is even worse if this happens
when the person is already aware of his life and the people around him. Such a scenario is
evident in the film when confusion reigns the mind of young Saroo in the streets of Calcutta
without a single place or person he could recognize (Davies 2016). This is a reflection on real
life situations of people in daily search for their identity through cultures and traditions of places
that make them feel at home.
The disintegration of family units begins as a result of various factors in society. For
instance, the case with Saroo’s disappearance from home town to an unknown street of Calcutta
separates him from his family and friends and keeps him away from home and the society he
knows. The incident means he cannot practice his ways of life and feel free to be himself because
out in the street, he’s always running and hiding for safety (Davis 2016). In Grant’s case,
discrimination and socio-political racism restricted his abilities to be free to belong to his society.
He states that in 1970 when the government was paying allowances for children to stay in
school, he together with his cousin were chased away and told that it was better to abandon
school altogether due to their ethnicity (Grant 2016). He goes ahead to explain that that was the
space that history had made and received for people like them. Despite his admission to his
circumstantial fate, Grant keeps fighting for recognition of his culture and tribe through
education which is described as his breakaway route. This showed systematic criteria designed to
selectively cut out children because of their ethnic affiliations and cultural orientation.