The man who kept planting

"The Man Who Kept Planting"

When Rajesh was eight years old, he watched the hill behind his village slowly turn brown. It had once been covered with thick green trees, home to birds that sang every morning. But over the years, people cut them down for firewood and farming. Soon, the soil became dry, the stream at the hill’s foot disappeared, and farming grew harder.

Rajesh’s father often sighed, looking at the barren hill.
“It’s nature’s way,” his father said. “Once gone, it doesn’t come back.”

But Rajesh didn’t believe that.

One day, he found a book in his school library about forests. It explained how trees held the soil, brought rain, and cooled the land. At the back, it showed how to plant a tree and care for it. Rajesh was fascinated. He decided that if the hill had lost its trees because people cut them, maybe it could gain them back if someone planted.

The next morning, he dug a small hole and planted a mango seed behind his house. Every day, he watered it with the little water he could spare. Weeks later, a green sprout appeared. It felt like a miracle.

That sprout gave him an idea—what if he planted not one, but many?

Rajesh began collecting seeds: mango, neem, banyan—anything he could find. He carried them up the hill after school. Some days he managed to plant five, some days just one. People laughed at him.
“Why bother?” one neighbor said. “By the time those trees grow, you’ll be an old man.”
Rajesh just smiled. “Then I’ll be an old man under their shade.”

The first year was the hardest. Goats chewed many of his seedlings, and summer heat killed others. But he didn’t stop. He built small fences from sticks, carried water in buckets, and replaced every plant that died.

When Rajesh turned eighteen, he moved to the city for work. He got a job as a bus conductor, but every month, he came back to the village and climbed the hill. The older trees were now taller than him, their leaves whispering in the wind. He planted more, pulling weeds, repairing fences.

Years passed. The villagers began to notice something strange—the hill, once dusty and silent, had begun to turn green again. Monsoon rain returned a little earlier, and the air felt cooler. Birds started nesting there.

One year, a severe drought hit the region. Crops failed in surrounding villages, and streams dried up. But Rajesh’s village had a small surprise: water still trickled from the stream at the hill’s base. The soil under the new forest held the rainwater longer, feeding the spring. It wasn’t enough to erase the drought, but it saved the village’s livestock and gave them enough to drink.

The same neighbors who had once laughed at Rajesh now came to him.
“You saved us,” an elderly farmer said. “We didn’t understand before. We do now.”

By the time Rajesh was fifty, the hill was almost completely covered in forest. The government heard of his work and sent environmentalists to study the area. They were amazed—Rajesh had single-handedly planted over 20,000 trees in his lifetime. They offered him an award, but he only smiled.

“I didn’t do it for awards,” he said. “I did it because I didn’t want to give up on this hill.”

On the day the award ceremony was held, Rajesh stood at the top of the hill. Below him, children from the village were running along forest paths, their laughter echoing among the trees. Monsoon clouds gathered overhead, and the smell of rain filled the air.

He closed his eyes and listened—the wind rustling the leaves, the chirping of birds, the distant rush of the stream. It was the same hill, but alive again.

Rajesh realized something important: change doesn’t come in a day, a year, or even a decade. It comes from showing up, again and again, even when no one notices, even when it seems impossible.

As he walked down, he passed a young boy holding a handful of seeds. The boy grinned shyly.
“Uncle, I’m going to plant them,” he said.
Rajesh smiled. “Good. Someday, someone will thank you for it.”


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Moral: Great things are built not in sudden bursts, but in steady steps. Your efforts today may seem small, even invisible, but persistence turns them into something unshakable. The world changes when you refuse to stop planting—whether seeds, ideas, or acts of kindness.