At the foothills of the Himalyas, Meher Baba painstakingly spelt out what He later said would become the "new Lord's prayer". He stood reverentially as His prayer to God the Preserver and Sustainer was read aloud. He prayed this way every day until the end of His life! He told Eruch, "Despite my helplessness, crippled the way I am... I [say] the prayer not for your sake, but for posterity... when anyone [hears] this prayer they will benefit from my participation."

On vacation, Pete Townshend found he had, by complete chance, simultaneously created the melody, and set the words into common time and ryme. "I had never ever composed a la Bert Jansch or John Rembourne before. I recorded the tune onto a cassette and was so struck with its 'stillness' that I dedicated it to Baba. The uncanny thing was that the new words and music fitted together like a hand in a glove! I felt as if I had nothing to do with the writing at all!"

Delia de Leon stressed the importance Baba placed on film so Oceanic was a center of film work. Young aspiring filmmakers gathered there. "One, Ginny Katz, came up to me and said she had been listening to my live recording from India and thought it would go really well with a montage of film of Baba from various times in His life. So I said, give it a go. A lot of us sat around and critiqued rough cuts, Ginny made the changes and the [original] film was made."

Play all 3 versions of the film free of charge in Flash
Learn more about its restoration
Buy the Pete Townshend DVD collectors box set
which includes a 32 page booklet detailing the history
of O Parvardigar in all its forms from 1953 to today
written by Pete Townshend and others in
Meher Baba Film Archive International
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Pete Townshend DVD collectors box set
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After Meher Baba Oceanic closed in the 1980s Pete continued his song writing and his recording careers both solo and with The Who. The work of Meher Baba Film Archive (MEFA) moved to Norwich in East Anglia, UK, in the care of another young filmmaker, Richard O'Casey. Pete Townshend remembers,
"I was always very careful and particular about how we treated the film of Baba - for the sake of the future, and bringing in film from India and America and examining it closely and caring for it very well was the beginning of my film archive work which continues today. The film was very dear to Delia and it's very dear to me. Delia was also the link between Richard and me."

As the work of the film archive progressed thru the 90s it became clear that the O Parvardigar film, twenty five years on, needed restoration and would benefit from having the higher quality, stereo and full length of the original analog tape recording of Pete singing the prayer/song at Baba's Tomb at the Third Amartithi in 1972. The future of television was also going widescreen, the shape of cinema film rather than documentary film. Recalling the discussions in 2002 Pete Townshend said,
"The film is played a lot to start and end Baba events, and has been held in high regard by many Baba lovers, so when we talked about updating it I was reluctant. But for tech-nical reasons the film had aged quite badly and there was the problem with the speed of the original footage. In the end we decided to do a restored widescreen version with 5.1 sound to show at Bhau Kalchuri's visit to Oceanic in July 2003 - the first Baba event there for 22 years. It was a great success and I think the DVD box set is superlative."

Richard sums it up like this, "It's what it says on the box: half a century ago Meher Baba wrote a prayer He said would replace The Lord's Prayer. Now once again prayer and film come together..."

So the first widescreen film
of Meher Baba was born.
And from that the DVD
collectors box set containing it
based on Pete Townshend's
concept for the 'Avatar' CDs.