Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

Since that time, such all-expenses-paid trips to distant cities have become a commonplace of Mario Miranda’s life, and as often as not Habiba too, joins him on them, particularly if Mario is going to hold exhibitions of his drawings in their galleries. She has emerged as the member of the team who knows how best these drawings are arranged for maximum impact.

For his part, Mario mixes business with pleasure. He has always been fond of observing life from the street level, and he goes nosing around, and making drawings of whatever catches his eye.

Over the years there must have been more than 20 of these trips and in their course, Mario Miranda has seen most of the world’s art capitals at least once, and some favourites such as London and Paris, he and Habiba have visited several times over. Tokyo, Macau, Singapore, Sydney, Brisbane, Honolulu, Berlin, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Lisbon, Madrid, most of the American cities, La Paz, Brasilia… you name it, chances are he has been there. He even managed to sneak into East Germany while Germany was still divided; behind the Iron Curtain, as it were, and enjoyed himself hugely.

Every single journey is meticulously recorded, as it were. If he held an exhibition, there are catalogues and the publicity material attending them. When there were no exhibitions, there are those on-the-spot drawings brought back by Mario and eagerly published by some newspaper or the other.

Mario discovered a steady and growing demand for his drawings from those who had nothing to do with the newspaper trade. People wanted him to provide illustrations for books. J.R.D. Tata asked him to pep-up a book one of his staff had written about the rise of the house of Tatas. Manufacturers of decorative souvenir china wanted his designs, and so did those who made decorative grilles with wrought iron. The wealthy wanted him to do murals. Air India even asked him to design some of his characters as puppets for them.