Ilaiyaraaja

160 Ilaiyaraaja 160 is an Indian film composer who works in the South Indian cinema but predominantly in Tamil since the late 1970s. Regarded as one of the finest music composers in India, Ilaiyaraaja is also an instrumentalist, conductor, singer, and songwriter. He has composed more than 8000 songs and provided film scores for more than 1000 films, particularly being acclaimed for his background scores.

Ilaiyaraaja was born as Gnanathesikan in 1943 in a normal middleclass family in Pannaipuram, Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India. When he joined the school his father changed his name as Rajaiya but his village people used to call him as Raasayya. Ilaiyaraaja joined Dhanraj Master as a student to learn musical instruments and the master renamed and called him as just Raaja. In his first movie Annakili, Tamil film producer Panchu Arunachalam added Ilaiya as prefix in his name Raaja and he named as Ilaiyaraaja because in the 1970s there was one more music director A. M. Rajah who was a popular one.

Source: Wikipedia