Blog 10

Using 3-4 quotations from Rushdie's Wizard Of Oz, tell how he would interpretation this video of Indian children singing a song from the American film.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5svfS_bnc

I think Rushdie would say that the video exemplifies the vivid and realistic fantasy world of The Wizard of Oz -- he speaks of its "realistic surreality" (Rushdie 27). The children are fully absorbed in this world...smiling, carrying on with their pantomimes of real behaviors, which probably seem quite real to them. As Rushdie says of Oz, it "finally became home" (Rushdie 57). This is also consistent with the fantasy-filled Bollywood cinema Rushdie recall that these children have likely been exposed to: "'We are all dancing out our stories," (Rushdie 11), as Rushdie quotes a Bollywood director.

The video also captures the pure happiness of some of the best parts of The Wizard of Oz, what Rushdie calls the "pure, effortless and somehow inevitable felicity," which he observes is as near as possible to an "authorless text" in its seeming inevitability -- perhaps reflected in the video by the absence of any director, or any adult (Rushdie 16). Consisting only of happy children capably performing their routines, the video would remind Rushdie of what he calls the "driving force" of the film: "the inadequacy of adults" (Rushdie 10), reflected in Dorothy's taking charge of her own life, the delight of the Munchkins and the weakness of both her adult caretakers in Kansas and the exposed wizard.

Rushdie could also not help but comment on the children's skipping, an imitation of Dorothy's skipping down the yellow brick broad which he admires and states is the "clever, shuffling little skip that will be the leitmotif of the entire journey," representing Dorothy's -- and perhaps the children's -- "steps out along the road of destiny" (Rushdie 44).