Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

All these years while his livelihood came from newspapers and magazines published in Bombay, it made sense that Mario too should be based in Bombay. But now, at Mid-Day, he found that he was doing the bulk of his work from home with only fleeting visits to the paper’s office. There was no reason why he could not do his cartoons from home.

Mario Miranda is best known as a cartoonist, but that hardly describes the full range of his professional activities, and he himself is somewhat dismissive of it: “I am not really a cartoonist. I just draw!” If only as a sampling of the full sweep of his activities, here are only some of the things he did in the nineteen-eighties, when incidentally we first met as collaborators on a commissioned book.

Earlier, he had provided the illustrations for a book on Karnataka that had been commissioned by the Karnataka Government, and for which the text was written by Dom Moraes. Then the Goa Government commissioned him to provide scenes for Inside Goa, a book on Goa, Daman and Diu, for which I was asked to write the text.
He took such assignments in his stride and, in addition, also coped with the rising demand for sketches for other books on Goa and for magazine articles. In between he was doing murals for hotel lobbies and designing puppets for Air India. And then, in the summer of 1984, he dashed off to Paris where he and Habiba lived for a month as the guests of Alliance Francaise.

All this while he was also doing his regular cartoons. Miss Fonseca’s fans did not miss her even for a day.

Then he disappeared again, this time to Australia. He ranged through that vast continent, saw its wonders such as Sydney’s Opera Hall and kangaroos and night clubs and brought back a whole brief-case full of on-the-spot drawings.