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Right now I am in much warmer climes than I am used to for this time of year (namely, the Carribbean), here with all my friends from the Sri Chinmoy Centre. Just as when we meet in New York, there are plenty of meditation functions which mix silent meditation together with singing and instrumental performances, poetry and more besides. Around this time of year in particular, there are plenty of pieces of spiritual theatre which are rehearsed and enacted for our fellow students of Sri Chinmoy in the audience. In fact I was in one such play a couple of days ago, directed by my friend Kaivalya from London.

Kaivalya wanted to enact a scene from the Mahabharata - tha great Iliad-like epic of India - detailing the climactic lead up to the terrible battle of Kurukshetra. This battle is ingrained in the Indian psyche, for out of it comes the dialogue captured in the Bhagavad Gita, India’s equivalent to the Bible. I was to play the weak and blind Dhritarastha, whose passivity encourages his avaricious son Duryodhana ever closer to war, despite Krishna’s best efforts to avert it.

I was to sort out the sound too. Big climax at the end, I was told - lots of earth shaking, tremors, rumbles, sounds of war, that kind of thing. So I went hunting on the web, found lots of nice sounds, but nothing that seemed to evoke the moment.

However on the morning of the play, I remembered the GarageBand program that came free with my Mac. I had used it very briefly in the week following the passing of my Master as a way of documenting that incredible time of transition, and the thought came to me now - why not try to create some kind of score? So I cobbled together all the sounds I had, messed around with the keyboard sounds a bit, and lo and behold, I had something.

So I went to Kaivalya (who was playing Duryodhana) and Vidura, who was playing Krishna (for those of you who know the Mahabharata, that’s probably a bit confusing, since Vidura is also the name of a historical character in that great epic) and presented them with the first draft. Too subdued, I was told. The beginning of the score documents a very intense scene where Krishna, seeing Duryodhana attempt to capture him, laughs out loud, showing the assembled audience as he does so a glimpse of his fearsome power as the Lord of creation and destruction - his Universal Form, as it commonly called:

“Krishna laughed, loud and long. Even as he laughed, he began to glow like lightning. All the devas emerged from his body. It was a terrifying aspect. There was Brahma the Creator, on his chest the eleven Rudras, on his shoulders Indra, Varuna, Kubera and Yama, Agni glowed in his mouth - all the gods assembled in his form. Balarama at his left hand, and on his right, Arjuna, behind were Bhima, Nakula, Sahadeva and Yudhisthira - all the heros were there. His arms were many. They held the weapons Panchajanya, the chakra Sudarsana, the gada Kanmodaki and the sword Nandana. Fire spread from his eyes and nostrils. No-one had the power to look. All eyes were closed except those of Bhisma, Drona, Vidura and the great Rishis. Even the blind king was given the power to see…

Dhritarastra: You are the Lord of the earth, and I have seen your form. Having seen you, I do not want to see anything else….”

So I was asked to try and capture something of that terrifying power.

So myself and Vidura went up to my room and did some apocalyptic laughter into the microphone, and I played around with things a bit. Unfortunately so much of my time went into recreating the first part of the score that I basically gave myself twenty minutes to do the rest - the climactic drums and tremors leading into the final declaration of war - so that bit sounds rather lame. In fact, I had to ask my brother Colm to play some ‘war drums’ and include it into the score literally five minutes before we were to go onstage.

So here it is, warts and all - I recommend it be played loud just as it was indended in the play.

The first minute is Krishna’s expansion into his universal form, then a lull for Dhritarastha to say a few words, and then finally the build up of drums whilst Krishna and Duryodhana switch from jaw-jaw to war-war (to grave-turningly misquote Winston Churchill)

The irony is, it never got used in full. During the play, as Krishna began to laugh and radiate power, it was played at full volume, drowning out everything else (according to plan). However it was so loud it triggered an automatic cutoff in the sound system so most of it was never played and the play finished in silence. The audience of course never knew any different, but we as the actors were definitely left with a sense of what might have been.