Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

His growing stature as a public figure brought responsibilities which he had to find the time to attend. The University of Goa nominated him to their Senate and he became an active member of an organization that Rajiv Gandhi who was then the Prime Minister set up to preserve India’s ancient monuments.

And so the years passed, ten by the calendar as it happens, but in those ten years, Mario had made a reputation for himself as a cartoonist as well as an illustrator that was no longer confined to India. That he was being invited to hold exhibitions of his pictures in the art centres of Europe and America, is itself ample proof of how his reputation had grown.

He began to think that his holding down a desk job did not leave him the freedom he needed to do things that he would really like to do.

So when his old friend and fellow Times Group staffer Behram Contractor decided to quit his job to work as the editor of Mid-Day an afternoon tabloid that a common friend, Khalid Ansari was going to start, Mario too went along as the Mid-Day’s cartoonist, but with the freedom to take on any other work he wanted.

In the event it turned out to have been a wise move, for soon he was flooded with requests for drawings and cartoons from a dozen different quarters. His earnings rose substantially too, and he no longer had to depend on a monthly salary. Artists are said to be highly un-businesslike, and Mario Miranda is no exception. Luckily Habiba is a much more down-to-earth person and she has tended more and more to fill the role of being her husband’s business manager.

For her part, Habiba had continued with her job of Art teacher at the Cathedral and John Connon School for close on twelve years, somehow managing to take time off for those foreign jaunts with her husband. Around the late nineteen-eighties, she gave up her teaching job to be able to devote more time to her domestic duties.

Even though they lived in Bombay, the ancestral house in Loutolim needed their constant care and attention. Just to keep it habitable, they had to employ caretakers and spend a lot of money for maintenance and repairs. Above all it needed frequent visits to Goa. There were times when either of them or both had to make prolonged stays in Goa to see to some problem about the house.