The world premiere of Mani Ratnam’s much-awaited Guru will take place in Toronto on January 11, a day before the film releases worldwide. Roger Nair Productions has acquired the Canadian rights of the film from Bobby Bedi’s Kaleidoscope Entertainment.

The star-studded premiere will happen at the prestigious Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre Centre (picture above). The film’s star cast including Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai, R. Madhavan and music director A.R. Rahman are expected to walk the red carpet.

The buying of the rights of an Indian film by a Canadian company is being seen as a landmark deal for Bollywood. Roger Nair Productions has entered the distribution market in Canada in a big way and will soon be buying films for North America and Europe as well.

Eve specials

Like every year, MTV and Vh1 plan to to take you through New Year’s Eve in style. For the fifth year in a row, Vh1 will honour winners in categories that captured the year in music, news, politics, arts and gossip with the Vh1 Big In ’06 Awards.

The categories include Big Entertainers — the celebrities that entertained us more than anyone else in the last 365 days. Big Music Artiste will concentrate on musicians that made the biggest noise in 2006. And you can be sure Shakira (picture below) will be there with her truthful hips.

Then there are other catchy categories like Big Mama (the celebrity mother whose maternal instincts rose above the rest), Big Power Couple (the celebrity couple whose clout trumped the rest), Big Download (the artiste that had the most talked-about download of the year).

The premiere of this “big daddy of a programme” will happen on Vh1 on December 31 at 11 pm.

The MTV celebrations will take place on December 30, when all New Year celebration songs will be played during the Saturday Dhamaal, starting 11 am. And on New Year’s Eve, setting the tone for the coming year will be a multiple dose of Roadies 4 with back-to-back episodes, starting 9 am.

Finally, MTV starts the New Year by playing the best of MTV on January 1. The run-up includes Fully Faltoo, Bakra, One Tight Slap and much more.

Bolly style

Sony’s way of saying goodbye to the year 2006 is a big Bollywood night called Jhoom Ke Aaja 2007. Starting at 9 pm on December 31, the special will have loads of naach-gaana, music-masti and hungama to herald the new year.

The programme starts with a performance by Ashley Lobo and his dancers to a song written by Javed Akthar with music by Ayaan and Amaan. Prabhudeva then takes over and is soon joined on stage by Esha Deol. The two dance to Chhaiya chhaiya before Esha goes Dhoom machale. Sachin and Supriya, winners of Nach Baliye 1, along with Riteish, will provide some Marathi flavour for the night.

It gets hotter as time ticks on. Bipasha Basu will rock the stage with Beedi before Bappi Lahiri takes over with his all-time hits and even some Bengali songs! Amrita Arora and Riya Sen will do their bit to up the glam quotient.

But the icing on the cake will be Salman Khan and Priyanka Chopra, who will dance to hit chartbusters like Just chill and Main hoon don.