There is a big black metal trunk underneath my sons’ bed.  We call it the Pandora box.  When he comes home from college for holidays and when the younger one is back home from Europe for his college holidays,  I have seen them both sit for hours, fiddling inside the Pandora box.  Chuckles, giggles, bursts of laughter and tears of nostalgia follow as they sit in their night suits till evening just watching every tiny thing inside the trunk and talking about it with a guffaw.  Sometimes strong memories lead to an enactment of WWF wrestling when they sit and jump over each other ruthlessly trying to win, just like when they were little children.  The Pandora holds broken toys, games with dice missing, tattered notes of’ Monopoly’, cards, old match boxes, soldering wire, marbles, litmus paper strips brought secretly from the school laboratory, their G I Joes , He man, Orko, jeeps of Gung Ho, guns, cars, dinky toys, Maggie noodle fun book, arduously collected stamp albums, broken pens and Rick racks. When both were away and I was cleaning their rooms, I collected many such items and put them in one big basket as ‘unwanted stuff’ in the house now.  Little children seldom came to our house that I had to entertain them with toys.  The television and the laptop were the only ‘toys’ today’s toddlers wanted to fiddle with.  Boys were way out of their teens now so I thought it would be pragmatic to give away the usable toys and games to underprivileged children.  I made sure they were told about how to play those games and I felt thrilled at my bit of philanthropy and organized way of living.  When the two big boys came home that summer they found some of their broken toys missing.  The lady bird books had reduced in number too. Just like always they both sat in their room with their Pandora box and somehow it seemed less full.  Frantically looking for the tiny binaca animals and Skeletor and G I Joes they fumbled their fingers inside the big half empty trunk. “Oh I gave many of your usable toys to the children in the neighboring slums I declared with pride”.  “Just imagine the glint in their eyes when I did so”.  It was so much pleasure to see those poor children grab those toys and play with them” I continued.  I even taught them how to play ludo and Chinese checkers “I boasted. I can still remember the wide eyed expressions of the two boys sitting in their Gucci Bermudas and Nike T shirts.  As though they had lost a treasure their faces fell when they heard my words. “But they were old and broken too, so I just thought they were junk for you” I still kept the good ones in tact” I explained.  “What is a little giving away of old toys to do with so much perturbed ness “I was almost annoyed at their Reluctance to share even what they really did not need. “ I always prefer to give away your things to children who could use them” I said adamantly , “ you don’t even need them any more , they were lying in your Pandora box so I thought some child could derive pleasure from it and so I gave them away” came my overpowering sermon. “We are not against your giving away habit mom! It is good of you to think of those underprivileged children” said the elder one.  “To you they are old broken toys but to us they are a treasure of childhood memories Mom! Said the younger boy.   They mean the world to us, you could have thought about our attachment to those toys a little” came the poignant criticism.  “Next time you give, please think about what you are ‘giving’,” they concluded.  For the very first time in my life I had realized what an inconsiderate mother I had been.  My two boys were not what I judged them to be, they were just as sensitive to the needs of others but not at the cost of sheer logic like mine. To the whole world a perfect junk, but to those two young boys, the Pandora was priceless wealth! Their second childhood! How could I? Oh! How did I? And from that very moment I have been awakened to the ‘injustice’ of ‘giving’. My so called generosity to those poor children was hardly justified at the cost of depriving my own!