With this group, he spent his next decade performing across South India. When he turned 14, he joined Pavalar Brothers, a traveling musical troupe headed by his elder brother Pavalar Varadarajan. Since Ilayaraja was born in a rural area, he was exposed to a wide range of Tamil folk music. He was married to Jeeva and the couple has three children - Karthik Raja, Yuvan Shankar Raja, and Bhavatharini - all of them are famous film composers and singers. He even learned Carnatic music from celebrated Carnatic singer, T.V. He is a gold medalist in classical guitar after learning the course through distance learning from Trinity College of Music, London. At a young age, he joined Master Dhanraj, a famous Tamil musician and instrumentalist to learn musical instruments. Ilayaraja was born in Pannaipuram, presently in the Theni district, Tamil Nadu, India on 2nd June 1943. He was also one of those earliest Indian film composers to utilize western classical music harmonies and string arrangements in Tamil film music. Ilayaraja is popular in the music industry for his skills to integrate Indian classical folk music and traditional Indian instrumentation along with western classical music techniques. He contributes his voice in varied regional language songs, but predominantly in the Tamil language.

Gnanathesikan, popularly known as Ilayaraja in the music industry, is an Indian film composer, singer, songwriter, instrumentalist, orchestrator, lyricist, and conductor-arranger. The latest and hit Ilayaraja songs are a must-add in your playlist if you love listening to soulful Tamil & Telugu songs. His songs made us fall in love with our crush, made us dance our hearts out on the floor, made us cry for losing our loved ones, and filled rainbows on our gloomy days. Whenever we talk about acclaimed Tamil singers who touched the strings of our hearts with their melodious voices, we simply cannot miss mentioning Ilayaraja in our talks.

Ilayaraja old telugu hit songs