MIDDLE
Soham, Said I

Somebody stop them. Somebody help me, please. I''m being stalked by the media. My individual liberties and freedom of expression are under threat, my privacy is being encroached upon mercilessly. They are writing about me all the time.
I am not suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Cross my heart, and swear to God, they really are after me. Ever since I came of age, a section of the media has been in hot pursuit of me, wildly brandishing some deadly acronym. I grew up, took my first job, aspired to do well. Yuppie, said the media. Young, upwardly mobile, professional. Soham, said I. Well actually I didn''t — I said, hey, I am that. Same thing you know, just new lingo or to be precise old lingo in new age bottles. Then I got married. We were having a pleasant enough time, DINKS, screamed the media. Double Income No Kids. They had our measure. Soham, said I.
Then one fine day they went to town about Puppies. Prosperous, urban, Punjabis. By fault of community if not of manners, I was that too. I left town, decided to settle down quietly in the suburbs but couldn''t shake them off still. We weighed all the pros and cons before we shifted from Delhi to Gurgaon — the commute, no inter-state cabs, the kids schooling et al, but this was one we did not foresee coming. Guppy, shouted the media. Gurgaons, urban, professional, Soham, Soham, said I to the puppy-guppy double whammy.
I thought I was through with them, out of it all, when I put a financially rewarding career on the back burner to pursue my love of writing. Aha, thought I, time to lie back and glory in my brave and original pursuit of a life of intellectualism and penury. The Tireds are here, shouted the newspapers rudely at me showing me out of that particular reverie. Thirty-something independent radical dropouts. These are the guys who''ve attained some degree of financial security, dropped out of the rat race and opted for second careers less remunerative but more satisfying in other ways, the news item explained. Soham time again, I concluded with perspiculity.
I am tired of all this, I told my spouse, hoping for a bit of sympathy. Don''t take it personally, he decreed, it''s a generational thing. You''re just typical of your generation, he said, putting all surviving hopes of being an original, to rest permanently.