Patil to attend Deshmukh son's wedding party

Mumbai: It will be a day of intense security and traffic hold-ups today as a stream of important personalities, including President Pratibha Patil, arrive for the wedding reception of Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh's son Amit.

Police have already informed people of regulated traffic movements on roads leading from the airport to Malabar Hill, especially at Tardeo, where the reception will take place at the Turf Club, Mahalakshmi race course.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress President Sonia Gandhi are likely to attend the reception.

Deshmukh is so concerned about the security for the VIPs that a restaurant on the premises of the Club had to cancel the wedding reception of another couple just 72 hours before even though the family had booked the place a year ago.

Amit is the eldest of Deshmukh's three sons. He married Aditi, TV actress and daughter of Karnataka politician Pratap Ghorpade, yesterday at traditional Maharashtrian wedding ceremony at a hotel.

Amit runs a co-operative sugar factory in Latur, the home constituency of his father.

Top personalities

Apart from close relatives and friends, the marriage was attended by almost all the senior members of the Congress party in Maharashtra, ministers, Uddhav and Raj Thackeray, corporate biggies and Bollywood personalities.

The chief minister's younger son Riteish is a Bollywood actor who danced with gusto with the "baraat" (marriage party) as they made their way into the hotel yesterday morning.

Earlier, on Monday night, Riteish and his younger brother Dhiraj had organised a typical Bollywood Punjabi-style surprise party for the bridal couple.