As the final countdown to the Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai “wedding of the year” (decade?) begins I can reveal some little known details. The celebrations started about a week ago at Jalsa, father of the groom Amitabh Bachchan’s home, in Mumbai. Catering staff from the five star Taj Group of Hotels, decamped to the household where they set up a 24 hour coffee shop and wined and dined about 40-50 daily guests, who often danced into the early hours of the morning. “There is even a camp male dance instructor on duty to help the guests practise their moves for the after wedding festivities,” my Taj mole told me, adding that ‘Kajra Re’ Rai’s popular item dance number has been “the most requested song to date.” Wot? No Dancing Queen?

Shobhaa Delights

“Aishwarya Rai has found the best role of her career. She will play it to perfection,” Shobhaa De told me when I asked her for her view on the soon-to-be Bachchan biwi (wife). De, India’s more intelligent and better looking equivalent to Jackie Collins, was in London this week to launch her own range of “cocktail saris” and to celebrate the belated UK publication of her saucy bestseller, Bollywood Nights (Penguin).

We met up at the Dorchester Hotel in London and I asked her if the book was an attempt to jump on the currently fashionable Bollywood bandwagon. “Of course it is, and why not?” she laughed, adding that in post-Shilpa Britain, it was “a smart move.” De remarked that the book reflected the “morality or lack of it” in current Bollywood and described it as “the definitive book about Bollywood to come out of India as it was written by a woman who knows.”

What did she make of this week’s Richard Gere-Shilpa kiss controversy? “He is an old hand at India; a man who calls himself a Buddhist ought to have known better than to kiss her in front of an audience of lorry drivers and truckers, who would have been offended,” De commented.

Bring out the bolly

Saed Jaffrey, star of My Beautiful Laundrette was one of the speakers at the launch of Rayat TV UK, a new Asian satelite channel held last Sunday at the Grosvenor House Hotel in London’s Park Lane. William Scally, operations manager of the channel, which is an offshoot of Doordarshan, India’s national broadcaster, told me that “the emphasis will be on crossover fusion programmes by young British Asian writers.” Jaffrey told me that he was especially pleased to be part of the UK’s launch as he is one of the founders of the original station “way back in the 1950s”. The champagne flowed freely, and it appeared Jaffrey probably enjoyed himself too much. When his wife Jennifer demanded that they leave, he refused to do so, telling her to “go and sit in the f***g car!”

Snap and tuck

“Rekha has not had any form of restorative surgery in the last 10 or 15 years,” Gautam Rajadhyaksha, India’s numero uno star photographer and cousin of the aforementioned Shobhaa De, told me when I asked him about the secret to Bollywood’s eternal diva’s youthful appearance. We had a drink at Sitaarey, a new Bollywood themed restaurant in London’s Covent Garden last week where Rajadhyaksha currently has an exhibition. He told me that he found current Bollywood flicks “terrible and very worrying and certainly not representative of the great amrit-manthan (turmoil) that’s happening in multi-racial, multilingual communal India.” What did he think of the new batch of hot wannabe’s? “They have become far too narcissistic,” the perky photographer told me, adding that today’s stars all have “great bodies with talent being the least important.”

Bollywood goes to Hollywood

The 5th Annual Indian Film Festival is currently on at Archlight Hollywood (April 17-22) in Los Angeles. Bollywood is breaking out big time in the USA: of the 14 foreign language films which grossed over $2 million in 2006, 7 were Bollywood. 2007 promises to be a much bigger year as Bollywood’s hold over the global box-office continues to increase.

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010