SP Balasubrahmanyam: He has sung 40000 songs in 16 languages

SP Balasubrahmanyam: June 4 happens to be Sripathi Panditaradhyula Balasubrahmanyam or in short SPB's 74th birthday. Modern Indian cinema has not seen many like him. In his nearly 55 year-career he has been many things to many people – playback singer, music director, actor, dubbing artist and producer.

An engineering student who dropped out to pursue a career in playback singing in the 1960s, he was quickly launched across three major languages, beginning with mother tongue Telugu, Kannada and then Tamil.

After being in the second rung of the top layers of the southern world, the late 1970s saw him catapult to the very top with the death of Ghantasala in 1974 and the introduction of Ilaiyaraja in 1976. Like the magnetic combo of Kishore- Asha in Hindi under R D Burman and others in the 1970s, he paired with S Janaki and they came up with many memorable, golden hits from then on till the late 1980s.

His Hindi foray and emerging as the voice of Salman Khan from ' Maine Pyar Kiya' and the subsequent alliances with A R Rahman and the latest music composer, Anirudh testifies his glorious phase of career.