Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

It was a modest start. The one or two cartoons he did every week for The Current brought a wage but did not take more than a morning’s work. There were days when he had nothing to do; much of this leisure he used in discovering Bombay.

Never a heavy drinker, he was fond of his evening drink. He soon got wise to the ways of getting around Prohibition. Many of his friends carried hip-flasks filled with gin which they would use to lace coloured soda drinks in tea shops. He bought himself a flask.

He became a regular patron of Aunty’s Bar, in Dhobi Talao. He became a favoured client of Aunty’s Bar because he sometimes took world celebrities there. Once he took Duke Ellington to Aunty’s. At another time, he introduced Alan Ginsburg to Aunty’s.

The Current was a well produced weekly magazine with a small but influential readership. Mario took a lot of trouble over his weekly cartoon and soon people began to notice them and appreciate them for their consistently high quality.

The editor of The Current D F Karaka kept egging on Mario to give him a cartoon that would lampoon Bombay’s Home Minister, Morarji Desai. The drawing Mario produced delighted Karaka, but when the public saw it, it caused a lot of adverse comment and Morarji himself was said to have been infuriated by it. That experience taught Mario the lesson that in India for an ambitious cartoonist to lampoon some political personage was to invite trouble.

The incident also brought home to him the limitations of his job at The Current. He was paid well for his work, but the work itself hardly kept him busy for a day. He wanted to do more drawings, earn more money. He had no desire to quit his job with The Current.
That was when Walter Langhammer, the Art Director of the Times Group, invited him to join the Group as an illustrator. C R Mandy, the editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, had liked Mario’s cartoons in The Current and wanted him brought into the Times Group to provide illustrations for the Weekly.