Ramesh Shotham was born in Madras, South India. He began his musical career as a self-taught drummer, co-leading a rock band called Human Bondage, established in 1970 in Bombay and Bangalore, then hitting the road gigging in clubs all over the subcontinent. Musical influences at this stage were The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and others. It took a live Ravi Shankar concert in Delhi and a chance meeting with a tourist who was heading back West and wanted to hock his albums, amongst them 'Birds of Fire' by the Mahavishnu Orchestra, for Shotham to begin discovering his own musical roots: the vast ocean of Indian music. During the mid-seventies, Shotham returned to Madras to study the thavil (a traditional temple music drum) under Vidwan K.P. Ramu. In 1987, Shotham introduced the late mridangam artist TAS Mani and Karnataka College of Percussion (KCP) to the German rock group Embryo, paving the way for Mani's popularity in Europe. Since then, he has lived and worked in Europe. Shotam is recognized as one of the most successful percussionists around. He has performed with leading European and American jazz and rock musicians and artists from Africa, Australia, China, Korea, and several Arabic countries. During the last 20-odd years, Shotham has recorded over 250 LPs and CDs and has worked for almost all the leading TV[2] and Radio stations in Germany and Europe. In the mid-2000s, he and his wife, Alexandra, established an independent record company called Permission Music Productions.