Manisha Koirala weds Nepali businessman, grand feast on Sunday

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KATHMANDU - In a fairytale wedding, Bollywood actor Manisha Koirala tied the knot with Nepali businessman Samrat Dahal in a traditional Nepali ceremony Saturday morning after an elaborate engagement and mehendi ceremony a day before.

The 40-year-old was wedded to the 33-year-old entrepreneur at the picturesque Le Meridien resort in Kathmandu Saturday morning.

Though her first hero in Bollywood, Vivek Mushran, flew to Kathmandu to attend the four-day extravaganza, as did Manisha’s friend and director Deepti Naval, there was not much of a Bollywood presence besides Sunita, who stood in proxy for her husband Govinda.

There was also virtually no sign of the Nepali film industry that has impassively accepted her return almost after two decades. Manisha returned to the Nepali film industry a few months ago, playing wife to its superstar Rajesh Hamal.

Nepal’s bigwigs, including political heavyweights, are expected at the wedding feast on Sunday, to be held at the Soaltee Crowne Plaza hotel.

Bollywood director Subhash Ghai, who first launched the doe-eyed Manisha in Bollywood with “Saudagar” in 1991, has been invited.

The newly-weds plan to throw a separate bash for tinsel town stars in Mumbai, where Manisha will continue to keep a foothold.

Her plans for Nepal had included opening a film city in Kathmandu and persuading Bollywood to shoot more of its films in Nepal.

Though the plan was shelved as well as the venture to make a Nepali remake of “Mother India” with Manisha in the lead, with an additional tie to her motherland now the old plans could be revived.

Dahal, an MBA from Texas, comes from a non-filmi business family that is into education as well as leather goods.

He himself is involved in launching a bio-gas factory in Pokhara city, where Manisha did a little bit of shooting recently for her new Nepali film “Dharma”.

The alliance has plunged him from relative obscurity into limelight, thanks to Manisha’s Bollywood career as well as family background.

She is the granddaughter of B.P. Koirala, Nepal’s first elected prime minister, and though she herself has not yet shown any inclination to join politics barring a misjudged campaign for deposed king Gyanendra’s government four years ago, her family boasts of three prime ministers, two deputy prime ministers and two MPs.

Her father Prakash Koirala was a minister in king Gyanendra’s cabinet in 2005.

The deposed monarch has been invited to Sunday’s reception, as has been his arch-foe, Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda. If both of them attend the reception, it would be the first time they would come face to face.

Manisha, who had been busy shooting in India less than a week before her wedding, has not made her future plans public as yet.

The couple will reportedly move out of Dahal’s family home in the Bansbari area of Kathmandu for a pied-a-terre of their own.