Kaleem Ullah, father of 300 varieties of mango in India

Kaleem Ullah, an Indian octogenarian, has produced more than 300 varieties of mango from his century-old mango tree.

 Since 1987, his pride and joy has been the 120-year-old specimen, from where the 300 different types of mango were produced, each with their own taste, texture, colour and size, says the 82-year-old.

"This is my prize of toiling hard in the scorching sun for decades," he 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."

The school dropout conducted his first experiment in grafting, or joining plant parts to create new mango varieties when he was merely a teenager, reports Economic Times.

Kaleem named one of the earliest varieties after the Bollywood star and 1994 Miss World beauty pageant winner Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, which remains one of his best creations to this day.  

"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 it tastes very sweet," he said.

Kaleem named some others in honour of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar. Another is "Anarkali", or pomegranate blossom, and has two layers of different skin and two different pulps, each with a distinctive aroma.

"People will come and go, but mangoes will remain forever. Years from now, whenever this Sachin mango is consumed, people will think of the cricketing hero," he said. 

His complex grafting technique entails carefully slicing a branch from one type, leaving an open incision, and then splicing and taping a branch from another variety into the wound.

Kaleem has received various honours for his abilities, including one of India's top civilian awards in 2008 and invitations to Iran and the United Arab Emirates.

"I can grow mangoes even in a desert," he says.