I was talking about Karan Kapoor, who is Shashi Kapoor’s younger son. Kunal Kapoor did have a semi-hit movie.

anyway its too late to debate it now

To contradict “RC on August 2, 2005 12:11 PM ” Kunal doesn’t look ‘too white for movies’ and doesn’t have blonde hair from what I’ve seen on the web: http://specials.rediff.com/movies/2004/feb/27sld1.htm and he does have roles in Hindi movies http://www.apunkachoice.com/people/act599/ He’s married to another Bollywood Royal Family http://www.junglee.org.in/kunal.html

As far as race vs. language first off, the profession of acting is considered a very bad thing to do socially, and the people drawn to it were marginalized anyway. Bollywood has an excess of actors who are muslim, parsee, Anglo-Indian, and even Jewish (Pramila, Bollywood actress, first Miss India other Bollywood actors include: Helen, David, Nadira & Sulochawa)http://www.answers.com/topic/list-of-asian-jews

The “paleness” came easily – people who went into making films for lack of other options happened to be pale. Yes, paleness is idealized because pale people stay pale when they don’t work in the hot sun all day (in China same fondness for palour, and small feet!). Of course there is a prejudice factor too but other things come into play as well.

Accents: in Britain a proper theatre accent for serious roles (e.g. educated) and the regional strong accents for comic roles. Standard. It’s not INDIA that makes these rules it is the profession of theatre. A lot of Tamil actors (Kamal Hassan most notibly) are excellent but have ‘Tamil accented Hindi’ and the audience won’t accept it – so Kamal’s Bombay exploits were flops…. and you wonder why they dub? In the west same thing: the silent films went to talkies from the 1920′s onwards, and many many actors careers crashed to a halt (or lived briefly through dubs then crashed). VOICE is a huge part of the experience of fantasy for these characters, serious, melodious ‘perfect’ Hindi goes with being ‘perfect’ looking – the audience wants it. We know that from Kamal Hassan and other Southern Actors who failed to thrive in the North. The only exception is if the accent itself is in demand, as were French accents in the 1930′s and 40′s in Hollywood for Romantic leads.

On the subject of perceptions, and misperceptions, of the U.S. and “The West” in general, in Swadesh when Shahrukh Khan’s character is invited to some village event and one of the elders says “People in America have no culture”, I thought to myself “Here we go again”, but I was suprised to hear SRK’s character say “No, that’s not true, they have their own culture too, etc etc”.