Prostitution versus Personal Freedom in Bunnag's Text Kartikeya Thiyam Sundaram College

The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it.

-John Stuart Mill

The extreme willingness to sacrifice oneself’s values and history in the pursuit of material success has become a sacred tradition in today’s society, and often leaves as collateral damage a life that may feel wasted, and that may have wasted the lives of several others, too. Much too often the escape from the universal suffering everyone experiences, a prevalent Buddhist notion, is to run away from it, and their subsequent quest for redemption often begins too late to change anything, rarely begins just in time, and in the case of literal forced prostitution, often never at all for those women whose wills were crushed by the men and women whose wills overrode their own.

The book The Naga’s Journey by Tew Bunnag, as the author says in an interview, “has to do with morality” and prostitution. In both the aforementioned novel and the documentary, The Darker Side of Bangkok, showcases the real world negative impact prostitution offers up and the varying ways people go about, if at all, rectifying their errors. The prostitution I...