Meet India¡¯s Mango Man, Whose 120-Year-Old Mango Tree Produces Over 300 Varieties

The 82-year-old Kaleem Ullah Khan walks over a mile every day to see his 120-year-old mango tree, which he has coaxed into producing more than 300 varieties of the beloved fruit over the years.

NDTV

¡°This is my prize of toiling hard in the scorching sun for decades,¡± Kaleem said in his orchard in the small town of Malihabad in Lucknow.

¡°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.¡±

First experiment as a teenager

The school dropout was just a teenager when he conducted his first experiment in grafting or joining plant parts to create new mango varieties, AFP reported.

He nurtured a tree to produce seven new kinds of fruit, but it blew down in a storm.

The New York Times

But since 1987, his pride and joy have been the 120-year-old specimen, the source of more than 300 different types of mangoes, each with their taste, texture, colour, and size, he said.

Mango named after actress

One of the earliest varieties he named ¡®Aishwarya¡¯ after Bollywood star and 1994 Miss World beauty pageant winner Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. To this day, it remains one of his ¡®best creations.¡¯

Times of India

¡°The mango is as beautiful as the actress. One mango weighs more than a kilogram (two pounds), has a tinge of crimson to its outer skin, and tastes very sweet,¡± Khan said.

Another one is Anarkali

Others he named in honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar. Another is ¡®Anarkali,¡¯ or pomegranate blossom, and it has two layers of different skin and two different pulps, each with a distinctive aroma.

NDTV

¡°People will come and go, but the mangoes will remain forever, and years after, whenever this Sachin mango will be eaten, people will remember the cricketing hero,¡± said the father of eight.

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