http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf5svfS_bnc

"The Wizard of Oz (the film, not the book, which I didn't read as a child) was my very first literary influence. More than that: I remember that when the possibility of going to school in England ws metioned, it felt as exciting as any voyage beyond rainbows."

- Salmon Rushdie

Even though it has been a long time since I've seen the film, the story (which almost everybody in the world is familiar with) centers around a girl being whisked away to a surreal, fantastically unfamiliar world in which she and several other characters all attempt to chase after their various goals. It is doubtless then that Rushdie, the famous novelist in exile, as both a child and as an adult, finds deep significance in the film's theme of finding maturity amidst cultural alienation, in spite of (and as a result of) a lack of suitable parental influence from which to draw guidance. Of the video Rushdie would point out that the film's production as a staged play by Indian schoolchildren furthers its theme of fantastic cultural juxtaposition, that the children involved must pretend to be traveling through a word created by by a culture which is already somewhat alien for the express purpose of looking strange and magical. The international spreading of such worlds which exist only in the collective cultural imagination can perhaps be seen as the ultimate expression of globalism. The Children may as a result see the world in which Oz was created as a sort of Oz in and of itself, much as a young Rushdie saw England.

"The Wizard of Oz is a film whose driving force is the inadequacy of adults, even of good adults, and how the weakness of grown-ups forces children to take control of their own destinies and so, ironically, grow up themselves."

The Wizard of Oz is a film which on many levels is about the following of goals and a fantastic quest for guidance. The characters spend the entire time searching for a mystical wizard who supposedly will help them all reach their own form of self actualization when in reality his ability to give said guidance is a myth perpetrated by varying members of Oz, in reality all the Wizard does is point out that people already are what they want to be. The interesting thing about this quote is that it also says that no matter how well we learn from our life experiences we are all destined to be inadequate parents in an eternally self perpetrating cycle.

"Orphans arrive, hoping that the ruby slippers might transport them back through time as well as space..."

Finally, Rushdie would assert that to a certain degree, the fact that the play has been reproduced to a point that it has become a children's production in an Indian school is a result of that cycle at work. If the fact that the inadequacy of parents contributes more than anything to the maturity of children is an inherency of the human condition than it must also be so that whenever a message that appears to work as a good bit of guidance enters itself into the collective consciousness of a generation it will be repeated almost to the point of redundancy, becoming yet another part of this cycle.