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India policeman's TikTok video helps family find missing father
May 28, 2020
A TikTok video intended to encourage people to help the poor had an unintended result when it succeeded in reuniting a man with his family.
R Venkateshwarlu, who had been missing for two years, was seen in the video filmed under a flyover 2,000km (1,242 miles) away from his home in Telangana.
A friend alerted the family who then reached out to police in the northern state of Punjab to help reunite them.
"I burst into tears when I first saw him," his son told BBC Telugu.
How did he go missing?
R Venkateshwarlu, who has hearing and speech difficulties, had lived all his life in a village in the southern state of Telangana. He has a wife and five children and was employed as a labourer.
In April 2018, he boarded a truck to go to another village for work.
"My father fell asleep and the truck driver didn't know he was there. Several kilometres later, the driver realised my father was in the truck and so he dropped him off on the middle of the road and left him there," his son, R Peddiraju, told the BBC.
Image caption The family were reunited after two years
Alone on an unfamiliar road, Mr Venkateshwarlu hoped to hitchhike a ride home, and eventually found another truck willing to give him a ride. But hours later, he realised the vehicle was travelling in the opposite direction.
That driver dropped him off in Ludhiana, a large industrial city in the northern state of Punjab.
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