The school dropout was just a teenager when he conducted his first experiment in grafting, or joining plant parts to create new mango varieties. Now, his 120-year-old mango tree produces 300 varieties of the king of all Indian fruits
Kaleem Ullah Khan, locally known as the ‘Mango Man’, shows how he grafts different varieties of mangoes on a 100-year-old tree at his farm in Malihabad, northern Uttar Pradesh. Malihabad has more than 30,000 hectares of orchards and accounts for nearly 25 percent of the national crop. Image: Maryke Vermaak / AFP
Malihabad, India: Every day, Indian octogenarian Kaleem Ullah Khan wakes at dawn, prays, then ambles about a mile to his 120-year-old mango tree, which he has coaxed into producing more than 300 varieties of the beloved fruit over the years.
His footsteps quicken as he draws nearer and his eyes light up as he peers closely at the branches through his spectacles, caressing the leaves and sniffing the fruits to see if they are ripe.
"This is my prize of toiling hard in the scorching sun for decades," the 82-year-old said in his orchard in the small town of Malihabad.
"For the naked eye, it's just a tree. But if you see through your mind, it's a tree, an orchard, and the biggest mango college in the world."