Until I came across the Robin Sharma bestseller The 5 AM Club: Own Your Morning, Elevate Your Life, I was hardly exposed to this fact. Due to traffic congestion, in an average lifetime, you are bound to lose out as much as three years, the standard time required to earn a Ph.D. in a typical case. This time you are only incarcerated in your two or three or four-wheeler contraptions. However, you can never be oblivious to the fact that time is a strategic resource, a factor of production. God creates different countries with different levels of endowments but does not do any injustice in bestowing any particular nation with this particular resource. All are equally fortunate in the allocation of this resource.

When city dwellers are caught in Eid shopping, they feel the pinch most. Now how do you control the damage? Did you ever think of enrolling yourself at a parallel university named TRAFFIC UNIVERSITY? Yes, we all are its pupils. In plain words, it is about leveraging your travelling times without incurring any further opportunity costs.

Most people caught in traffic are mere passengers for whom the Traffic University concept is easier to adopt. Keep one hand free to carry a book (yes, in this heyday of gadgets we would love to insist on paper books!). Even if this is a growing minority in the metropolis, this still is a beauty. Enhance the time dividends by reading the book you need most or at least the book you love most. That makes you a gainer from this apparently losing condition. If your groceries and long list of purchases engage both of your hands, you can surely turn to devices. You have the option of audiobooks and podcasts (we are optimistic that we can defeat the everlasting sound pollution).

Now what happens if you run the vehicle yourself amid the congestion? Unless it is bumper to bumper for hours, reading could be an extraordinary ordeal. In many instances, busy city dwellers, such as top office bearers and corporate bosses, drive home after a busy day at the workplace and are mentally very jaded. They may be in a self-driven car and not in a state to concentrate at all. However, they may still have tons of calls to attend. They may refresh themselves with Beethoven, Mozart, Beatles or Taylor Swift and catch up with the unattended calls. Traffic University is multi-disciplinary after all!

Privately owned cars apart, the mass transports need to be made reader-friendly. There is no avoiding the traffic tyranny: from Dhaka to Dublin, from London to Lagos. The intensity and scale may differ depending on the town planning and related factors. We have to live with it and smartly manage it. The Bishwo Shahitto Kendro (BSK) runs a successful mobile library project, which may be emulated by our mass transports. We may insert a Reading Café in all mass transport and load those with popular books, journals and monographs. Not merely the incarcerated time but rather the whole travelling could be made more educative and productive in that initiative.

Our long-distance mass transports travel different directions from the zero point/capital city. Those could be turned into a storehouse of knowledge and information about the local societies, folklore, relics, historic places, famous individuals, tourist attractions, culinary traditions and whatnot! Why can't our long-distance luxury mass transit adopt this concept if airports and airplanes can? The proportions of internal tourism in Italy and Saudi Arabia are, respectively, 70% and 43%. These are indeed formidable figures.

Finally, your time is your valuable strategic resource, be it at the individual level or the national level. If invested properly, the returns are exponential. Time and again, it has been proven that of all other sectors, investing in self (i.e., reading) is the best form of investing. Instead of missing out on this most precious resource, as we suffer from traffic uncertainties, let us come under the umbrella of Traffic University and make good use of every single penny of our very own currency.

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The writer is the Ambassador of Bangladesh to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), Jeddah, Saudi Arabia