Weekly Buggles

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Manmohan lashes out at Advani for inaction on Babri.htm

Man sentenced to life for raping daughter.htm

Akshay Unbuttoning Act, Twinkle Arrested.htm

Bollywood has lost another veteran filmmaker in Shakti Samanta, known as the wizard of entertainment after giving pure entertainers like An Evening in Paris and Kashmir Ki Kali.

The veteran filmmaker died Thursday after a month-long hospitalisation in the Nanavati Hospital at Ville Parle in the western suburb of Mumbai. He is survived by his wife and two sons.

Though Samanta started with making B-grade movies in the early 1950s, he became one of the most successful names in the business a decade later.

As the unstoppable star of the 1960s, Shammi Kapoor helped Samanta steer his career to success. So did Rajesh Khanna, the superstar, during the following decade. And the filmmaker admitted that unequivocably and with all humility.

“What made Shakti Samanta different from many other successful filmmakers was that he never took recourse to cheap subjects to pander to the box office. His movies saw box office success by their own merits,” said filmmaker Vidhu Vinod Chopra.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the first time publicly admitted that he would have resigned had the Indo-US nuclear deal not gone through last year.

The confirmation by Singh himself about what has been speculated in political circles for a long time made it clear that it was on his insistence that Congress president Sonia Gandhi agreed to part ways with the Left parties.

“I was quite clear if the Indo-US nuclear deal had not gone through, I would have resigned,” Singh said in an interaction with women journalists on Friday.

The decision to go ahead with the deal in July last year had turned the Left parties into bitter foes of Singh’s government, which they had supported for more than four years.

The PM also said there was a serious threat to disturb the elections through militant incursions.

“There is no doubt that terrorists have not given up the evil design to destabilise our country to interfere with the poll process,” he said.

Commenting on a wide range of subjects, Singh slammed his main rival for the prime minister’s post, BJP leader L.K. Advani.