Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Mario Miranda remains attached to St. Joseph’s High School and makes it a point to visit it every time he finds himself in Bangalore. To the staff and students of today’s St. Joseph’s, he is their model student - an Old Boy who has achieved fame and who visits his old school.

If only as a fitting punctuation mark to Mario Miranda’s ending his school days, and also as a testimony of the way he had already developed his art, here is an incident at school as remembered by Antonio Menezes, a fellow student.

“Our Science teacher Alec Alvares once demonstrated how invisible ink was made. He gave the class an assignment to make some invisible ink, write a few words with it, and to bring the papers to class. He would hold them near a glow-lamp and read them out. When he was reading these messages, he held up one paper and demanded: ‘Who did this?’ It was a caricature of Alvares himself. Mario stood up and admitted that he was the culprit. The Science Master stared at him for a long time. Then he said, ‘You seem to have a gift for this sort of thing. Keep it up and good luck to you.’”

In 1943, Mario Miranda came to Bombay. He was seventeen years old. The Second World War was still raging. Mario had vague thoughts of going to Paris to develop his natural gift for figure drawing by doing a course at the École des Beaux-Arts. But while the war was on, no foreign travel was possible. The next best thing was to study Art at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Bombay itself, and that was what he had come to Bombay for.

As at Bangalore, in Bombay too, his parents ever mindful of his comforts, arranged lodgings for him at the flat of some Goan friends in Holland House on Colaba Causeway. His parents also arranged that he would take his meals in a fancy restaurant Gurdon’s near Churchgate station.

Mario did attend classes at Sir J.J. School of Art for a day but disliked it. That one day at the J.J. School of Arts was the closest he came to receiving formal training for his life’s calling. Instead, he joined St. Xavier’s College to study for a Bachelor of Arts degree in the History of the English Novel. Mario passed his B.A. with Honours in English.