The International Indian Film Academy Awards took over an industrial complex in Brampton last night

By Matthew Hague | June 24, 2011

By Matthew Hague | 06/24/2011

In Brampton, Bollywood is kind of a spectacle. (Image: Matthew Hague)

On a typical Thursday night, the parking lot of Brampton’s Trinity Common Mall, surrounded as it is by big-box outlets of Addition-Elle, Suzy Shier and Home Depot, is about as sexy as the thought of Stephen Harper stripped to his skivvies. But last night, it hosted the first major event of this year’s Indian International Film Academy Awards—the world premiere of action-comedy Double Dhamaal—and although it was still obviously a parking lot in Brampton, the Bollywood star power made the humdrum surroundings sparkle like a maharaja’s jewellery. Find out which Bollywood stars walked the carpet last night in our gallery after the jump.

The green carpet (so coloured to raise awareness for global warming) was rolled outside of the SilverCity movie theatre and was flanked by hundreds of excited Indian cinema fans waiting patiently for the celebs to arrive from their digs at the Royal York Hotel. Traffic must have been bad on the 410, because the first stars didn’t hit the red, er, green carpet until a good two hours after the event was supposed to start, but the fans went crazy as Double Dhamaal’s stars—Riteish Deshmukh, Arshad Warsi, Mallika Sherawat, Kangna Ranaut, Aashish Chaudhary, Javed Jaffrey—mugged for the cameras and answered soul-penetrating questions (like this one for Sherawat: “Can you do a bikini shake for us?” Her response: “No, can you show me how it’s done?”) with other Bollywood personalities like Lisa Ray, Anil Kapoor, Irrfan Khan, Aarti Chhabria and Boman Irani.