Seeing the news of Saalumarada Thimmakka receiving the Padma Shri and in turn blessing President Kovindji, brought back a memory when I a chance to read about her in a newspaper while on a flight to Bangalore. Just felt like sharing today.
Thimmakka is an old woman living in a rural district in Bangalore. She worked as a labourer in her younger days. She was married to a cattle farmer. Much to their anguish, the lady was unable to conceive. The childless couple was subjected to many a ridicule over the years. One day, they decided to plant trees and tend for them as their own off springs.
Banyan trees were there in abundance in Thimmakha’s village. The couple prepared grafted saplings from the trees with their own hands. In the first year they planted ten saplings along a distance of four kilometers, in the neighbouring village. They planted fifteen saplings in the second year and twenty in the third and many thereafter. The couple carried water all along the ‘plantation’, to water and nurture the saplings and cared for them as if they were new born babies. They protected them from stray cattle by putting thorny bushes around them.
In 1991, Saalumarada’s husband Chikkaya, passed away. She revels in the memories and in the shade of the trees they planted together. The locals call her Saalumarada’s, which means a row of trees in Kannada. The lady at the age of 107 years has planted 384 Banyan trees and 8000 trees of various kinds. She is a living example of what positivity and resolve can do to change ones mind set. (Some available data tells us that in comparison to the population, there are only twenty eight trees per head in India. This is the lowest ratio of man to trees in the world. We really need to plant trees if we want to save our country.)
Often times, life is beset with miseries and setbacks; situations that seem to be the end of the world. But if you look beyond … The horizon is vast and beautiful, if you have the vision and the inclination to look for it. Kudos to her spirit! Banyan trees are symbolic of ancestors and elders. Perhaps Saalumarada is like a Banyan tree herself!