Anjan Sundaram Quotes About Congo

• The first victim in journalism today is proximity. I know I've used that word a lot. Because of foreign budgets, newspapers have consolidated, and journalists now cover dozens of countries at a time. It is physically not possible for one person to understand and live the unique sets of experiences in all these places in honest and meaningful ways. Outlets used to send journalists to places like Congo for months at a time, and they were stationed there for months or years. There was a sense of immersive reporting, and that has been a casualty of the shift in news over the past years.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Meaningful, Country, Unique

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• My purpose at that time was to expand my experience of the world and to immerse myself as deeply as I could in powerful events that I thought would begin to help me understand the world, and myself, in larger ways. Looking back, it's difficult to imagine my life without the Congo now.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Powerful, Purpose, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I certainly think that many of the themes, and many of the ways that I wrote about Congo, will continue to live on in my work. One of the fundamental aspects of my work is for myself and the reader to see the world that they think they know in a different way.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Thinking, Different, World

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• In abstract mathematics or abstract art, the purpose is to describe inner states of our mind, and to explore the limits of our own imagination and our capacity for creativity. While this has some applications in the world, I think it leads to a distance from the world. Going to Congo was for me an act of seeking proximity, of breaking that distance. With abstraction, which is brilliant and vain, you divorce yourself from any kind of proximity to other people.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Art, Distance, Creativity

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I chose Congo in order to become close to a place that we had turned away from. It isn't present in our imaginations, in the stories we tell each other. Yet it's relevant to our lives and to our worlds, in a practical way. Congo supplies raw materials for the things that we use on a daily basis. We are intimately linked to Congo, economically. We're linked to it through human events that are occurring there, that affect all of us, and yet you don't find narratives of Congo present in our lives.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Imagination, World, Relevant

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• What I really intend to achieve is to be that fly on the wall, and to try and observe as much as I can without affecting what I've seen. I want to get a sense that what I'm seeing in a place would have happened had I not be there. Were I to make myself an important presence, that would be lost. The danger of a certain other kind of reporting is that people give you what they think you are seeking. People know what you want. When I was traveling in Congo and Rwanda and people asked me what I wanted, I would say, "Nothing. I just want to be here." And that immediately disarmed them.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Wall, Thinking, People

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• We are not held accountable for how the economy ravages Congo. Governments aren't held accountable for foreign policies that they exercise there. There are no institutional structures to render justice. The press is very limited. There's very little transparency. You find a symmetry in certain basic human tendencies, and these tendencies are not always noble or beautiful. I think we have an instinct to turn away from that, to not acknowledge it, while it is something that's a part of us. There's a certain tragic and sad side to human nature that, in our quest for beauty, we ignore.

  Anjan Sundaram

  Beautiful, Exercise, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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