Mukesh Ambani and his wife Nita during the opening ceremony of 18th edition of Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival at The Royal Opera House, Charni Road in Mumbai. Pic/Shadab Khan

Nita Ambani excused herself to catch a flight to Amsterdam for son Akash's 25th birthday, but not before treating Bollywood to her famed hospitality at the film fest's after-party.

Speaking in chaste Hindi — and one wonders how many of the foreign delegates at the city’s premier Mumbai Academy of Movie Image (MAMI) film festival understood it — Amitabh Bachchan recounted how he had “first come to Mumbai in 1950, and lived with the grandparents of industrialist Gautam Singhania (also present in the audience).” They had taken him along to see his first film in the city at the Royal Opera House, and he was “stunned to find there was such a thing as a ‘box’ in a cinema hall.”