Biography

- Manohar Malgaonkar

That is how Mario Miranda defines his own art. He draws whatever catches his eye in the life around him, and he also provides captions to the drawings. He is thus essentially, a candid camera recorder of the passing show, which for most part he finds funny.

He can be sombre and brooding too, conscious that some of the subjects which appeal to him as an artist are not necessarily objects of fun. A temple, a church, an ancient ruin, a graveyard and an abandoned fortress - these have a personality of their own and it would be unseemly to hold them up to ridicule.

“Where there is humour, I will do a cartoon. But when I do structures, I don’t do cartoons… I enjoy drawing much more than cartooning.”

That is how Mario Miranda sees his own art. He is a humourist, but there are times when he stands and stares in awe or respect, moved by whatever he is looking at. At such times he strives hard to recreate in his drawings, the emotional impact of the originals. In this he is remarkably successful.

Mario Miranda has spoken of two branches of cartoons, ‘social’ which he favours, and ‘political’ which he shies away from because of the restraints he must work under. There is however, at least one other ‘branch’ of his art which offers scope to the wildest fancies of its practitioners - animal cartoons.

As a child he is known to have howled when a pet dog of his died. In those days of grace and space, there were even a couple of deer in his house. He himself has kept pets wherever he had a house: dogs, cats, roosters, a squirrel or two; four turtles used to crawl all over his flat in Bombay, and visitors had to be wary not to tread on them; and yes, a pig!

Dogs seem to be so much in his subconscious that they have a tendency to steal into his ‘social’ cartoons almost without his knowledge, just to lend tone to them, as it were. These are mostly of the stray dog variety and of some indeterminate breed, but they seem full of their own importance too and perfectly capable of looking after themselves in a scrap.

Mario often tells the story of one of his own dogs, Tommy, passing judgment on one of his drawings on which he had lavished a good deal of care. He had drawn the picture while the paper was still wet and had leaned it against the wall of his study to dry. That was when Tommy walked to the picture, solemnly raised his leg and formally anointed it. Was it a gesture of profound disgust or unbounded admiration? Who can say? Perhaps students of canine psychology have the answer.