IIFA Awards 2014 - Day 4 - April 26, 2014, Saturday

John Travolta @ IIFA Awards 2014

Lots of excitement of IIFA was finally coming to a finale!!  It was the last day of IIFA events with the main IIFA Awards show being held in the Raymond James Stadium!!  My friend and I got ready to head to the Hilton. By this day, it had become an everyday thing to head to Hilton after getting ready...:).  The two main events planned in Hilton was the press conference with John Travolta and IIFA Master Class Panel with Kevin Spacey but the latter one was invite only whereas the John Travolta press conference was open to the media.  We went in the room and found a spot to stand (it was already packed with people) and waited for John to arrive.  The press conference went well and got a hint that he might be performing in the evening show...well, that's certainly something to look forward to!!  Soon after, there was a press conference for Nawazuddin Siddiqui where he was interviewed by few media people.

IIFA Awards 2014 Crowd @ Raymond James Stadium

The original plan for the day was to get the evening clothes with us to the Hilton so we didn't have to go back to the hotel to change and get ready.  Keeping this in mind, my friend and I both packed our clothes to take with us to save time in the evening.  It turned out that I brought everything except my ticket for the IIFA Awards. I had to go back to the hotel, get ready at the hotel and then head to the stadium.  This took a lot of time which meant finding a parking spot much further than the closer parking lot :(.  When I got there, it was completely packed with zillion people!!! There was no room to squeeze in and on top of that it was burning hot....must be 85 to 90 degrees!!  I was not on media side since my friend stayed at hilton and left from there whereas I left from our hotel room to the stadium so it was hard to find her but I eventually got in touch with her and she was able to take me to the media side since she had my badge with her.  Even after going to the media side, the actors had not started arriving, so I just relaxed a bit (standing, of course) and waited for the show to begin!!  Before I got busy, I did snap a pic as a memory to see how crazy crowded it was at the stadium.

Farhan Akhtar & Shahid Kapoor @ IIFA Awards 2014

I am not going to post any green carpet pics of the IIFA Awards as there are waaay too many, but I will post some pics of the actual show.  The green carpet for this event went on until 10:30/45 pm.  The show was supposed to start at 8 pm but lucky for me that it started 2 hours late, so I only missed like 45 minutes of it which didn't have any Bollywood performances, so I was very happy about it.  Another reason to be happy was that my friend had 2 floor tickets and her cameraman finished before time so he was not going to come inside and my friend asked me if I wanted to come with her to the floor seating!!  I was like "of course!!"...haha...it was really nice of her to ask me to come with her for that ticket since I know I wouldn't have had the same view with the upper seating ticket that I had originally bought :).   We went inside the stadium (it must have been like 15 minute walk) and I would say the main show started after we got in!!

The show was fantastic!! It did go on for looooong time though, to be precise, it was 5 hours long.  They did a lot of time pass in between but fun overall!!  There were performances by Priyanka Chopra, Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Siddharth Malhotra, Madhuri Dixit, and Hrithik Roshan.

Powerhouse Ranveer Singh Performance

I think all the performances were great, but 2 which struck the most were Ranveer Singh and Hrithik Roshan.  Both were powerhouse performances with full on energy and great dance moves.  Also, the other highlights were John Travolta dancing with Priyanka Chopra on Tune Mari Entriyaan and Kevin Spacey dancing with Deepika Padukon on Lungi Dance!! It can't get better than that!  Among all this, Shahid and Farhan even took a Bollywood selfie with the celebrities, inspired by the Hollywood selfie taken by Ellen in Oscars.  What do you guys think?

Bollywood Selfie @ IIFA Awards 2014

The show finally ended at 3 am in the morning and the next challenge was to get to the car and get out of the parking lot.  This event was in the Raymond James Stadium which had the audience of about 25,000 to 30,000.  Can you imagine the kind of chaos it had created getting out of the parking lot??  No, you can't!!  It took us 40-45 minutes just to get out of the parking lot :( and then another 20-25 minutes to get to the Hilton hotel.  The reason we went to Hilton is because that's where the after party was and thought that maybe if we get to see some stars on the last night of IIFA.  Just as we pulled in to the parking garage next to Hilton, we could clearly hear Hrithik's voice hosting the party.  I was so excited to think that he might be in the after party for a bit, so we quickly parked the car and walked fast to the hotel (even though our feet were hurting like hell from standing on the green carpet for soooo long).  It turned out that the celebrities had their own separate party going on where Hrithik was hosting it, but  nonetheless we still made it to the after party for the non-celebrity people :).  The first thing we did was get something to eat since we were starving and had not eaten since afternoon!!  Food was great, finally, there was something to eat!! This entire event took the entire night which we didn't expect.  My friend and I headed back to the hotel at 7 am in the morning, completely tired and exhausted.  As soon as we got to the room, we both crashed in our beds!! It was one hell of a day and night!!

The rest of the IIFA weekend, which included an entire Sunday, I will post later with more details of the Hilton visit, visit to the Clearwater beach in Tampa, and saying bye to friends and Tampa, FL.

Hope you enjoyed the IIFA coverage from my point of view!! Cheers!!