CAN'T SAY NO

My mom always used to say to me:
“Beta start saying NO to some people, it isn't wise to be the yes-sir man always”. I never paid much
heed to her advice and rather paid the price the other way. When I started my journey in UET, I joined
many societies because I knew I could never make 'my mark' from studying. Later on, it proved to be
a wrong decision. The hazards that I face every day cannotbe summarized, yet many of them that I
can avoid by saying one NO are:
When I go to university, one of my friends asks me to mark their proxy in any lecture or lab,
depending upon their intensity of sleep. Sometimes I get away with this easily, but when I get
caught up in the claws of raven, I mean to say instructor, it gets a bit nasty. Yet when I'm coming back
from the campus to my room, a friend asks me to accompany him to a route, of his alleged girlfriend;
I say ok and sit on a route with him. It takes us two hours to reach there, given the conditions of roads
and traffic of Rawalpindi and Islamabad. It makes my life worse as I travel like day-scholar and live
like broader. If in any case he doesn't want to go after her, he asks me to stroll here and there in the
university campus, which makes me tired.
When I reach back to my room, I'm asked by a senior to come to his room immediately for some
'society work', and it takes usually 2 hours to be completed. I fell exhausted when I take myself back
to my room and suddenly I get a call from another senior, to deal some matters about the
community. I get back to I-hall, thinking about my mother's advice. It takes almost an hour to 'deal'
with these issues when I finally unlock my room, and think of all the assignments, quizzes and vivas
of the next day. When I begin to start my work, a class-mate knocks my door and asks if I could help
him with the quiz and I, scornfully, say YES again.
In the end when I lay down on my bed, it is usually 3'o clock in the morning. Sometimes I think that all
this hectic and over-drive schedule can be turned into a much smoother schedule by simply saying a
NO to a couple of people. Yet, another day comes and the same routine carries on and on. This all
happens to me because either I don't listen to my mom or because I CAN'T SAY NO!

                                                                                                                      ZAID BIN FAROOQ
                                                                                                                              UET Taxila