Twelve years ago, in 2013, I was held in police custody in Doha, Qatar, following an allegation of insulting Islam. At the time, I was teaching at Qatar Academy. The allegations were brought by the father of a student. The event stemmed from his twelve-year-old son’s retelling of an exchange in the cafeteria between him, two of his friends, and me. However, I was released after just twelve days in custody following a massive international “Free Dorje Gurung” campaign. Following that, while I suffered gravely personally for years as a consequence of the traumatic experience, I did not suffer professionally…until now. Well, at least that’s what I know.
Two days ago, a recruitment agent informed me that they would not be following through with their interest in registering me with them.
This situation began with my applications for jobs they advertised. However, as you might imagine, I had no place to disclose that brief history. Believing that honesty is the best policy, when a representative from the agency followed up by calling me to discuss my candidacy, I shared the details. I rounded it off by saying something to the effect of, “I wanted to share all that firstly because this information is public; secondly, because I have nothing to hide; and thirdly, to avoid you discovering it later and questioning my honesty.” Of course, working in education, I know how employers conduct background checks. The person on the other end basically told me that there were absolutely no issues with that, as I was not convicted.
However, I did not hear back from them. The next time I heard back from them was after I applied for another job. But this time I received an email from the agent. Apparently, they claimed my phone number on my CV was incorrect, which was not the case.
To make a long story short, I ended up calling the agent who brought up the Qatar issues, stating that the company was a little uncomfortable with it all. I reassured the agent that everything about it is in the public domain and that I would be happy to email links to the relevant articles. Hanging up the phone, I immediately composed and sent it.
Here’s a reproduction of what I sent her:
Subject: Links to articles about the 2013 incident in Qatar.
Date: Tue, May 6 at 9:51 AM
Dear [name of agent[.
As promised, the links to the articles about my being held in police custody in Doha, Qatar for allegedly insulting Islam and my subsequent release after twelve days following a massive international Free Dorje Gurung campaign.
The first one that appeared on DohaNews: https://dohanews.co/qatar-academy-teachers-fret-as-former-colleague-jailed/.
The second one from also DohaNews: https://dohanews.co/teacher-appears-in-doha-court-faces-felony-charge-of/.
The third one from also DohaNews: https://dohanews.co/international-community-rallys-around-nepalese-teacher/.
The one published by Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/09/qatar-jails-a-nepali-teacher-on-charges-of-insulting-islam/ (It’s behind a paywall though!)
The following were published after my release from police custody.
DohaNews: https://dohanews.co/nepalese-teacher-accused-of-insulting-islam-released/.
Another DohaNews article: https://dohanews.co/teacher-accused-of-insulting-islam-leaves-qatar/.
Washington Post article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/13/teacher-jailed-in-qatar-is-freed/.
Hopefully, that helps and they’ll suffice. If you need more, you could Google Free Dorje Gurung. For a long time, that used produce a lot of hits about the incident. I don’t know if still does but you could still try.
Regards,
Dorje Gurung, ScD (h.c.)
But clearly, that did not help. I received the email reproduced above saying that they “would not be able to complete your registration” in response.
And why am I sharing this story? More than anything, due to the striking recurrence of the number twelve. The incident in Qatar involved a twelve-year-old, twelve adults associated with Qatar Academy not pushing back against the father of that child, twelve days in custody, and freedom on the twelfth of May in 2013, exactly twelve years ago.
Coming from a science background, I love numbers, data, and I have been working a great deal on and around them. If you have been reading my blogs, you know all about that. During the Coronavirus Pandemic, I tracked the pandemic-related numbers for Nepal the whole time, ending up with forty-six spreadsheets of data and analysis in my Google Drive, for example. I am fascinated by numbers, and their trends and patterns whenever I come across them, even if they don’t mean anything, such as the pattern in the reported age of the population of Nepal. In fact, that fascination and curiosity about numbers, as seemingly insignificant as they might appear, has often led to unexpected discoveries, as detailed in the ‘Additional Reading’ below.”
What do you think?
PS. For your information, I got help from Gemini, Google’s AI, composing this blog.
Additional Reading
Links to a few blog posts about unexpected, eye-opening, fortuitous, strange discoveries I have made about Nepal from data and/or data analysis.
- Until I converted the marital status data found in the 2011 Census Report into pie charts I had NO idea that more than a third (36%) of Nepal’s age nine and older population were unmarried and almost 3 in 4 (74%) married females had been married (off) before they turned 20!
- Until I converted the education level data into histograms, I had no idea that the level of education of the population of Nepal was so abysmally low–much less than 10% have 12 or more years of education!
- Another time I was creating charts and graphs, I discovered that the Government of Nepal hid a lot of information about the population of the country before 1952-54 and even during the rule of the Shah autocrats, notably about the ethnic/caste composition of the population.
- Tracking COVID-19 data for Nepal and also related data, a chart alerted me to the fact that the country was reporting on antigen-positive cases but NOT tracking them at all!
- Tracking COVID-19 vaccination drive in Nepal and analyzing vaccine data, I discovered that we suffered from vaccine inequity.
- Less than 10% of those in their last year of kindergarten when, in 2009-10, data for the the 2011 Census Report were being collected made it through 12th grade in 2022!
- Something really shocking I learned was that the biggest killer of reproductive age females in Nepal is suicide!
- I discovered data that show how the level of violence again children in Nepal is unacceptably high, much higher than I had expected.
- I discovered data that show females in Nepal are raised to have unexpectedly high tolerance for violence against them from both their husband and mother-in-law.
