The Happy Pod: AI helped find the siblings I didn’t know about

**Holly Gibbs** (0:00)
This is The Happy Pod from the BBC World Service. I'm Holly Gibbs, and in this edition, Nicky said, yeah, are you, you know, my mom's son?

**Avtar Singh** (0:15)
Then my mind switched and said, Oh my God, I'm actually talking to my sister.

**Holly Gibbs** (0:19)
The man who used AI to try and track down his mother, only to discover he had three siblings. Also on this podcast, It's incredible.

**Matt Fultz** (0:28)
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**Holly Gibbs** (0:39)
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**Mick Wadge** (0:45)
It's a full workout. When we finished, they carried me out and put me in the car.

**Holly Gibbs** (0:52)
The 88 year old who is channeling his grief into weight lifting and.

**Theresa Day** (0:57)
One of the kids that visited, he increased his reading levels by two grade levels. It made us feel good, like we're actually make a difference in these child lives.

**Holly Gibbs** (1:08)
The library on wheels, getting children excited about reading.
A man in Canada has used AI to find three siblings who he never knew existed. Avtar Singh, who was born in India and is now 66 years old, grew up not knowing his Kenyan born mother. His father had separated from her and not told him anything about her, apart from her first name, which was Savinda. One day, Avtar typed her name, approximate age and links to Africa and India into AI, and found a blog post by someone called Nicci Dhamu, a jewelry designer in London. Avtar reached out to Nicci and after talking about their past, the pair realized they were actually half siblings. My colleague, Julian Warwicka, has been speaking to both Avtar and Nicci.

**Nicci Dhamu** (1:59)
I grew up with so much creative influence from my mom. About a year and a half or a year after she died, I think, I wanted to honor her creativity and honor the creative legacy that she's left me, which is what I express through my own work.

**Julian Warwicka** (2:18)
Obviously, her past, which included Avtar, wasn't something that had been discussed at all.

**Nicci Dhamu** (2:24)
Never spoke. She never once said anything in a direct sentence that I have been married before.
I became the detective when I needed to find Avtar for my mom, because in her later years, she was crying. She had dementia. She would say, mera bacha and cry. But mera bacha in Punjabi means my child.

**Julian Warwicka** (2:50)
Avtar, having read that article, what was the next step?

**Avtar Singh** (2:55)
I crafted an email that, that I would like to learn more about your mother's life in India, because I do feel, just from reading the article, that it touched me and we might have some family connection. So I said that.

**Nicci Dhamu** (3:09)
I read this email and I was just like, whoa. My mind started thinking, is this, is this Ditu? Is this mom's son?
I must have read it a couple of times and I started getting quite emotional.

**Avtar Singh** (3:22)
I'm not surprised.

**Nicci Dhamu** (3:23)
And I sent him a very polite reply saying, I'd be open to having a conversation. When we did actually speak, Bajie, why don't you tell them what you were asking me?

**Avtar Singh** (3:32)
So I said, you know, can you tell me about your mom's life in India? Then I did ask, I said, well, did she have any children?
And Nicky replied with the answer that kind of made my heart kind of stop for a few minutes that she had a son. And that silent pauses where the next words that Nicky said to me just-

**Nicci Dhamu** (3:54)
How I said, are you?

**Avtar Singh** (3:55)
Yeah.

**Nicci Dhamu** (3:57)
Are you Titu? Are you my mom's son?

**Avtar Singh** (4:00)
I just could not believe I heard that. And I just said, pardon, could you kind of repeat that again? And she said the same name again. And this sheer flood of emotion that I could not control came out and I was just in tears because it's a nickname of mine from childhood. But the pronunciation of saying Titu was done by my grandmother when I lived in India. I said, this is my final confirmation.

**Nicci Dhamu** (4:31)
And he started crying.

**Julian Warwicka** (4:33)
I think you both did.

**Avtar Singh** (4:34)
I was crying.
I'm crying even right now. Every time I replay that in my mind, tears comes to my eyes.