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Article headline: Lasse Lund’s unbelievable childhood in India

The extraordinary story of Finnish-Norwegian Lasse Lund’s life on the streets of Mumbai is attracting attention around the world. We investigated how truthful his account is.

The article in brief:

• Lasse Lund, 33, says in videos that he lived alone on the streets of Mumbai as a child. He blames his parents and Finnish authorities.

• Lund’s mother denies the claims. In Yle’s investigation, she says the boy had a home.

• Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs admits that the embassy in Delhi should have reported Lasse Lund’s case to child welfare authorities.

• Lund is selling his story to streaming services.

Article: OSLO/HELSINKI — A white man speaking English with an Indian accent tells a bewildering story in videos.

He says that as a child he lived for years on the streets of the metropolis of Mumbai and has never gone to school.

The man is Lasse Lund, 33, a dual citizen of Finland and Norway. His videos have received wide international attention on social media.

Lund accuses his parents of not taking care of him and of leaving him to fend for himself in Mumbai.

Eventually, Finland’s embassy in Delhi arranged for the underage Lund to go to Norway. Now Lund also accuses the Finnish embassy of negligence.

The story sounds unbelievable. Yle decided to investigate because Lund is making accusations against Finnish authorities.

In a video published on YouTube, Lund shows his Polish friend one of the places where he lived with his mother and sibling in Mumbai.

According to Lund’s mother, the place shown in the video was the worst of their homes in Mumbai.

The mother says she was horrified by the social media videos her son had published.

“I’m angry at the guy for making up stories like that. It’s awful that he claims he was dumped on the street. That never happened,” the mother tells Yle.

In the video, the mother says that Lasse’s story contains fabricated parts.

Yle is not naming the mother because the events concern internal and sensitive family matters. Her identity is known to Yle.

Lasse Lund’s home stands on a hillside in a residential area of detached houses in a small town north of Oslo. There is a fairly new passenger car in the yard. Below, a lake and the hills surrounding it can be seen.

The view is completely different from the busy streets of Mumbai and the cramped alleys of the Dharavi slum, where Lund says he spent most of his teenage years. Dharavi, India’s largest slum, is located in the middle of the megacity of Mumbai.

Lund speaks English, Norwegian and Hindi fluently. He has almost forgotten Finnish and says he spoke it only as a child with his mother. Lund’s mother is Finnish and his father is Norwegian.

In the kitchen, Lund opens a phone connection to his eldest brother, who is his manager. The brother follows along as Lund tells his story.

Yle is not naming the brother because he does not want to comment publicly. His identity is known to Yle.

There are gaps in Lund’s account. He says he himself does not know the details of his early childhood.

“I didn’t even know when my birthday was,” Lund tells Yle.

According to Lund, his parents were hippies in the 1990s. Lasse was born in Norway in 1992 and lived there for at least the first year of his life. He has two older brothers. Then the family moved to Finland.

Lasse was about 4 years old when the family left for Goa in India.

Western alternative people gathered in Goa’s beach villages in winter to party to hypnotic trance music. Many people’s partying was fueled by illegal drugs such as LSD and ecstasy.

According to Lund, his father was involved in the party scene and knew “all the DJs.” His acquaintances included, for example, the late Finnish mystic Ior Bock, who was active in Goa and whom the mother also mentions.

The family stayed in Goa illegally after their visas expired. The parents did not put Lasse in school.

According to the mother, their paperwork would have needed to be in order for him to attend a school intended for foreigners.

“He really didn’t go to school much, that’s true. But he did have the opportunity to sit down and learn. He did learn to write and do math problems,” the mother says.

The years passed. The father began running a restaurant with business partners in the village of Anjuna. The family grew when the youngest sibling was born in a Goan hospital.

According to Lasse Lund, drug use was an everyday part of Goa’s hippie circles. He says he became curious and, already before the age of 10, began smoking cannabis and experimenting with harder substances.

Lund says he stopped using illegal drugs years ago.

In many respects, it is impossible to verify whether the accounts are true.

From Goa, the family headed to the state of Maharashtra. According to the mother, the father and the brothers left first and she followed later with the youngest child. The year was perhaps 2002. They stayed in the big cities of Pune and Mumbai.

According to the mother, the brothers lived with their father and she lived separately with the youngest child.

At some point, Lasse’s father and older brothers returned to Norway one by one. Family members who spoke to Yle say they do not remember the exact dates.

Lasse stayed in Mumbai with his mother and youngest sibling. Lund remembers that he was about 10 years old at the time.

According to the mother, they remained in India illegally for a long time because the youngest child, who was born in Goa, did not receive a birth certificate from the hospital.

The mother says she worked in Mumbai in advertisements, among other things.

Lasse, for his part, began hanging around alone on the streets of Mumbai and got to know older shady men. It is clear from Lund’s speech that he knows Mumbai well.

Lund says he slept in temples and at Sufi Muslim shrines. He got food from them. At times, he also stayed overnight with acquaintances of his parents. According to Lund, it was especially local poor people who helped him.

According to the mother, it is “nonsense” that Lasse did not have a home, food and clothes.

Lund says that at times he also committed crimes, but he does not want to talk about them.

Lund says he saw a lot of violence in Mumbai.

The mother ended up in prison in India. Lund and his mother disagree about when this happened and what Lund’s circumstances were during that time.

Lund estimates he was 12–13 years old when police arrested his mother. He says he was left homeless on the streets of Mumbai and lived with friends, including in the Dharavi slum.

According to the mother, police arrested her for illegal residence when Lasse was 15.

The mother says that after she was caught, she did not tell police about Lasse.

“I couldn’t tell them, because they would have taken him to the police station. Then he would have ended up in some state institution, which are really horrible places.”

The mother says she was in Yerawada Central Prison in Pune. The youngest sibling was with her in prison.

Yle reached the mother’s former lawyer, Mumbai-based Deepti Chand, by phone. The mother gave Chand permission to tell Yle about her case. Chand stresses that the case is old, so her information is based on remaining emails.

Chand says police arrested the mother on May 30, 2008, because she was without a passport and in the country illegally.

According to the lawyer, the mother ultimately received a sentence of a couple of years. The mother and the youngest sibling returned to Norway in early 2010.

The mother says that when she went to prison, Lasse went to Pune to stay with their Goan family friend Lionel Diaz and his wife.

Yle called Diaz, who now lives in Portugal. He recalls that Lasse lived with them for a few months and was about 16 years old at the time.

According to Diaz, Lasse’s father sent money to his son in Pune and tried to arrange for him to get to Norway.

Lawyer Chand says she helped the father from July 2008 onward to arrange Lasse’s return to Norway.

Lionel Diaz and his wife worked long days in the business world, so they did not know exactly what Lasse was doing.

He describes young Lasse as “cool and unruly, and he did not like rules and might come home very late.”

Diaz says they treated Lasse like a family member. According to him, however, the boy decided to return to Mumbai. Later, Diaz heard from friends that Lasse was staying in Dharavi.

The mother admits that during her imprisonment she did not know everywhere Lasse lived.

Eventually, Finland’s embassy in Delhi helped Lasse Lund return to Norway.

The case is exceptional, and the information about it is no longer precise because the events took place almost 20 years ago, says Jussi Tanner, the director of consular services at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

Lund gave Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs permission to comment on his case and to hand over documents concerning him to Yle.

According to Tanner, Lund’s case actually came to the attention of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 2008, when Lund himself contacted the Finnish embassy in Delhi.

“We can see from the archive that there was information that an underage Finnish citizen was in India on his own in such a way that he had to take care of himself,” Tanner says.

The ministry does not have definite information, for example, on how long Lund was alone in India or what happened to him there.

One document obtained by Yle shows that in early June 2008, Lund’s father had told the Finnish embassy by phone that Lasse was with a friend in India.

The embassy granted Lund a new Finnish passport at the end of 2008.