‘Yati Gati’ is a performance series curated by Temple of Fine Arts and Atta Galatta. In line with its core intent of ‘staging the dialogue between the artist and the audience’, the evening will host a moderated interaction between the artist and audience about the art form and the thought process behind the work performed.

In the upcoming Yati Gati evening, Bala presents an evening of Padams, the amorous song form genre of carnatic music, the repertoire of the hereditary matrilineal musician families. Sung in a slow tempo, the languorous musicality and unhurried rhythmic structure of the padam affords a loss of temporality cutting across time and space and is one of the most characteristic compositional forms of carnatic music. This  form is at least five centuries old and is informed by the poetic idiom and musical aesthetic of the subcontinent for over a thousand years.

Balakrishnan Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is a doctoral student in cross-cultural musicology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Bala's work focuses on oral traditions of music across the Indian subcontinent, with an emphasis on
the politics of spirituality, sacred songs, South Asian performing traditions, mystical traditions, caste, gender, and sexuality. He is a STEM-trained computer science engineer as an undergraduate, and an Arts/Humanities/Social Science trained doctoral student. Bala trained for over twenty years in traditional vocal music, including a two-year-long immersive discipleship with South Indian Classical musician Dr.R.Vedavalli and fifteenth-century mystic poet-saint
Kabir's philosophy and songs from Shri.Prahlad Tipaniya. With over ten years of interdisciplinary performance experience, he attempts to re-imagine the many ways of looking at traditional music from India, centering the marginalized experience at the intersection of song, immigration, race, gender, personal narrative, transnational experience, and performance.