Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 216

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Today's Topics:

   1. Mumbaicha Mario (Mumbai Mirror, 26/4/26) (V M)
   2. Grave Ecological Collapse (O Heraldo, 26/4/26) (V M)


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Message: 1
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:03:45 +0530
From: V M <[email protected]>
To: V M <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Mumbaicha Mario (Mumbai Mirror, 26/4/26)
Message-ID:
	<CAN1wPW67fs5iJLSZgcBq3uJva1=WFUk7H50d0uh37f9RmmPNrA-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/mumbaicha-mario/articleshow/130519134.html

Next weekend on 2nd May is the 100th birthday of Mario de Miranda, the
iconic artist and illustrator whose vibrant, whimsical oeuvre remains
deeply beloved and highly influential even 15 years after his death in
2011.

Miranda?s merchandising sales have kept growing via multiple Mario
Gallery outlets selling hundreds of products in several Goa locations,
but an uncomfortable paradox nonetheless plagues his artistic legacy.
The work is world-famous, but the artist is regularly sidelined and
dismissed as a ?cartoonist.? That injustice always rankled greatly,
but now, just in time for his centenary, an extraordinary treasure
trove of his original artworks has emerged to correct the record. 100
of them will go on display from 8th May at Sunaparanta in Panjim, with
another iteration intended for Mumbai later in the year. Here is Mario
Modern, very different from Postcard Goa, and these works demand an
urgent historical reassessment. They are an immensely moving and
impressive testimony to how hard this ambitious young Indian artist
worked from the 1950?s onwards, growing in mastery and confidence
alongside Bombay morphing into megacity Mumbai.

?Mario's legacy has sadly been reduced to cheap quality grotesque
prints where the colours are changed, and made completely garish to
appeal to trinket-seeking tourists,? says Shaun Lobo, who built this
stunning corpus from works first acquired by his late father Ronnie, a
close friend of the artist. He wants to showcase ?all the styles Mario
had, and his role in documenting Indian aspirations from the
1960's-1980's.?

Lobo says ?my earliest works in this archive are from Paris when Mario
was on his Gulbenkien Scholarship in Europe. The collection is a
reflection of his career. Other early works are from the Illustrated
Weekly of India and journals like Filmfare in the 1960's and 1970's.
Some are from the iconic Sketchbook about life in Bombay, depicting
the very different lives led by elites and the common man. Then, from
the 1980's, he reinvented himself as book illustrator and muralist. I
have some of his works from this era, and several others that were
done abroad in countries like America, Israel, and Germany.

Several of these images are already relatively well-known in popular
reproduction, including the wonderfully original Mumbai map experiment
that accompanies this column. However, the originals are another thing
altogether, revealing a great deal more about the artist and his
times, and their impact on our own contemporary imagination.

In an acute 2008 assessment of Mario?s importance, Ranjit Hoskote said
this work is ?central to the development of postcolonial Bombay?s
sense of itself as a multiethnic and multilingual metropolis in which
local and cosmopolitan impulses play out an intricate dance of
antagonism, mimicry and collusion. As in the Bombay-centric poems of
his somewhat older contemporary Nissim Ezekiel, there is space for the
global traveller and the supercilious secretary in Mario?s art, but
there is also room for the wry pavement-dweller and the industrious
dabbawallah. Mario?s Bombay is capacious and kaleidoscopic, an epic
that dismantles the divides of class and ethnicity. And in this, it
reflects the imagination of an artist who has made himself at home in
diverse milieux, regions and periods.?

Hoskote said ?despite having attained iconic status as a chronicler of
Bombay, Mario has not received the homage that is due to him as an
artist. It would be worth exploring the reasons for this negligence of
the fullness of his activity as an image-maker. In the course of a
public career that spans 56 years, Mario has articulated himself
largely through editorial art, an idiom that the conventional
hierarchy of art-making ranks below the so-called fine arts. Editorial
artists are regarded with some dismissiveness as being narrowly
purpose-driven; it is believed that they are tainted by having their
work embedded, as lightweight relief, within a popular medium with its
compulsions towards entertainment and advertisement. Taxonomy is a
terrible thing. Once people have slotted you under a certain label, it
becomes very difficult to persuade them to see you through another
prism. This is remarkably unfortunate, for it does great injustice to
an artist like Mario Miranda, whose art has assumed many forms and
unfolded in various contexts of meaning.?


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Message: 2
Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2026 22:09:11 +0530
From: V M <[email protected]>
To: V M <[email protected]>
Subject: [Goanet] Grave Ecological Collapse (O Heraldo, 26/4/26)
Message-ID:
	<CAN1wPW4E9eWexKHj5n7UDLgwLoB4Zmb2h75R4GEtr_oejT+GvA-JsoAwUIsXosN+BqQ9rBEUg@public.gmane.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8"

https://www.heraldgoa.in/edit/by-invitation/grave-ecological-collapse/472936/

It is only April but Goa is already sweltering in extreme heat, with the
air quality index (AQI) spiking over 100, ranging from officially ?poor? to
?unhealthy.? To make matters much worse, although inherently water rich,
India?s smallest state is nonetheless suffering drought conditions, with
widespread scarcity exacerbated by supply restrictions and groundwater
contamination. Meanwhile, utterly mindlessly, the massacre of trees
continues to accelerate, as the landscape is torn apart by unscrupulous
profiteering and criminal misgovernance. In the Assembly earlier this
month, the administration admitted it?s no longer safe (as per Central
Pollution Control Board criteria) to swim or bathe in any of our rivers or
beaches, and there was yet another alarming red flag moment a few days ago,
when all the fish in Mala Lake suffocated en masse.

There?s no secret about why any of this is happening, as you can see from
this newspaper?s reporting about the latest calamity: ?A casual walk around
Mala Lake is enough to understand why hundreds of fish recently turned up
dead. Open drains carrying black, stagnant water, choked with plastic and
garbage, can be seen flowing unchecked straight into the lake. In some
stretches, sewage pipes appear to empty directly into the water body ? an
unmissable, unaddressed reality that lays bare the source of contamination.
Despite inspections and official activity following the fish deaths, the
most obvious cause of the crisis continues in full public view. Residents
say there is little mystery here ? only prolonged neglect.?

To be sure, terminal neglect is only one byproduct of the systematic
malfeasance and corruption beggaring Goa at high speed. In the case of
Mala, it manifests in ?a blind eye? but in Miramar past Caranzalem to Dona
Paula the result is rampant concretization with high-rises on the waterline
and hundreds of new hotel rooms to duplicate the mess at Calangute. What
about the roads, the residents, any concerns about carrying capacity? Where
are the public consultations, the environmental assessment reports?

Wenceslaus Mendes wrote an insightful survey of Goa?s water crisis in Down
to Earth earlier this year, which applies equally to other aspects of the
environment being wrecked all around us: ?Goa?s water crisis is often
described as a problem of mismanaged scarcity, but the evidence tells a
different story. The state receives abundant rainfall and is threaded by
rivers, wetlands and a long coastline. This is a failure of governance,
marked by planning that fragments ecosystems, marginalises community
knowledge, and favours short-term growth and profit over long-term
resilience. From eroding beaches and polluted rivers to collapsing khazan
lands, the patterns are connected. When dunes are flattened, rivers silt
up. When wetlands are filled and plateaus destroyed, floods intensify and
groundwater disappears. These are not isolated failures, but the cumulative
cost of treating water as infrastructure rather than ecology.?

We all know the scale of the problems, so it becomes very hard to not feel
helpless, but it is  precisely such pain and anger that can develop into
powerful art. That has happened in Goa, where Amchem Mollem harnesses
fantastic imagery alongside stellar activism, senior artists like Loretti
Pinto often return to themes of exploitation and there has also been a
series of standalone landmark moments like the one depicted in the
photograph on this page, when Miriam Koshy-Sukhijia?s Earthivist Collective
responded in spontaneous anguish to the vandalization of acres of mangroves
at Merces.

?We created a spiral installation of prayer flags made of gauze,? recalls
Koshy-Sukhijia, because ?all that remains of that once-thriving vast tract
of mangroves is a massive stretch of skeletal trees. What had been
destroyed was not just the forest but an entire habitat, and beautiful
ecosystem. When trees are to be felled, they are marked in red. Leading the
eye to the central spiral of prayer flags are trees draped in red, to alert
people to question this destruction as they whizz past along the highway.
The installation was an invitation to pause, enter, witness, experience and
engage with the site, to gather, meet, talk, perform, and add to the
much-needed collective healing in the face of the constant onslaught of
ecological grief. In retrospect, I feel gratitude for how this work birthed
a community [that was] willing to come together to witness, respond and
create a space for engagement at the very site of destruction.?

Koshy-Sukhijia says ?I have spent half my life in Goa, raising my children,
now both young adults, and watched it being bled dry. In the last two
decades, we have traded our canopies for concrete. Our mangroves - those
silent, sacred buffers that held our coastline together?have been choked by
plastic and cleared for sprawl. Our laterite plateaus, once wild with
endemic flowers, have been flattened for housing complexes and industrial
estates. Our khazan lands, fed by ancestral wisdom, are salting into
emptiness. And our trees have been felled one by one to make room for roads
and resorts. The sea is rising at nearly one and a half millimetres every
year, and the cyclones that never came to Goa now arrive like clockwork.
This is not change. This is dismantling. I feel it in my body - this grief
that has nowhere to go. Our children are growing up in the shadow of
absence. They are learning to love a landscape that is disappearing before
they can fully know it. And that breaks something in me that I cannot name.
But here is what I also know. I am not only a mother. I am also a future
ancestor. I am not only mourning what was lost. I am claiming what remains.
I am telling my children - and their children, and the children I will
never meet - that there were some who refused to look away and fought for
them like the ground beneath our feet depends on it - because it does.?


End of Goanet Digest, Vol 21, Issue 216
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