By some weird quirk of fate, when my phone beeped on Sunday morning with the message, “Noted cartoonist Mario Miranda expires at 85”, I was flipping through his latest book containing a collection of cartoons from his diary of the year 1951.
This was the sixth collection of cartoons of Mario that I was reviewing (the earlier five being a set of five books containing the master’s best cartoons throughout his life) and I was forming the opening paragraph in my mind when the message arrived.
The cartoonist, who was the face of Indian humour and satire for five decades, would perhaps approve that what was meant to be the review of his last book would become his obituary. Mario is survived by his wife and two sons. The last rites are to be performed on Monday.
For many non-Goans, Goa was Mario and Mario was Goa. For most of us, our introduction to the seaside state has been through the cartoons of Mario in The Illustrated Weekly of India, Femina, Times of India and the Economic Times and Goa has had no better ambassador than him.
Born in Daman in 1926, Mario Joao Carlos do Rosario de Britto Miranda started his lifelong affair with art by drawing on the walls of his house, which prompted his mother to get him a note book which he called his “diary”. His early works depicting the village life of Goa, the priests, the musicians, the toddy tappers and buxom fisherwomen, all of whom are perhaps as famous today as the state itself.
After working for a few years in advertising in Mumbai, Mario moved into the world of cartoons with The Illustrated Weekly of India and subsequently the Times of India and its sister publications. It was here that Mario introduced the world to immortal characters like Bundal Dass, Popatlal, Ms Fonseca and Ms Nimbupani.
He travelled extensively in Europe, UK and the US and had the opportunity to work with people like Charles M. Schulz, the creator of Peanuts and Sir Ronald Searle, whom Miranda considered his mentor.
Back home in India, Maria met fellow artist Habiba Hyderi. The couple married and later retired to his ancestral house in Loutolim, in south Goa where he breathed his last after a series of age-related complications on Sunday.
He had been awarded the Padma Shri in 1988 and the Padma Bhushan in 2002 and truly has it been said that “no one captured the vignettes of Goa like Mario Miranda.”
While the state and central government will no doubt go through the motions of grief and send messages of condolence to the bereaved family, it will not be forgotten by those who were associated with him that his final years were not very comfortable and hardly anything was done to provide any financial assistance to one of the greatest artists India has ever produced.