shakti.jpgThere's an uproar in India this week over a videotape that shows Shakti Kapoor, an actor well-known for playing Bollywood villians, offering to help a wannabe actress get roles in exchange for sex. In the footage, recorded in a hotel room by an undercover reporter and broadcast on scandal specialty station India TV, Kapoor explains that many top actresses have benfitted from his "casting couch." "You  have to do it just once," he says. Though Kapoor admitted feeling "pained over the way the channel framed" the incident, others in the Indian film industry insist a lot of fuss is being made over nothing. This kind of thing apparently happens alll the time, and is in fact endemic to the way Bollywood works; as producer Mahesh Bhatt put it, "The rot is within us." The Guardian UK has the full story.