Shankar Mahadevan

Born in Mumbai, India on March 3, 1967, Shankar Mahadevan is an award-winning Bollywood playback singer and member of the popular songwriting trio Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy (S-E-L) with guitarist Ehsaan Noorani and keyboardist/music director Loy Mendonsa. Shankar Mahadevan was born into a Tamil Brahmin speaking family and learned to play the veena – and Indian stringed instrument – by the age of five. He studied music while attending high school and college but graduated with a degree in Computer Science and Software Engineering. Initially taking a job as a software engineer, he quit his job in order to focus on a music career. He made his debut as a playback singer in the 1985 film Vahinichi Maya. Over the next decade, he became a successful playback singer and composer, working on many different Bollywood productions. In 1997, he joined forces with guitarist Ehsaan Noorani and keyboardist Loy Mendonsa and became an enormously successful trio, composing music for over 50 Bollywood soundtracks. Their compositions have been performed in five different languages: Hindi, Tamil, Telegu, Marathi, and English. Shankar Mahadevan continued to work in a solo capacity and collaborated with several different artists including Javed Akhtar (1998’s Breathless and 2003’s Nine), Appu (2000’s Gopal), and John McLaughlin (2020’s Is That So?). Shankar Mahadevan’s solo hits include “Vaseegara” (2003), “Desh” (2010), “Red Alert (Telugu)” (2015), “Shiv Tandav Stotram” (2018), and many others. During the course of his career, he has received many awards and honors from the Indian music and movie industries.