Biography|Akbar Al Baker — Born Beside This Standing Market in Old Doha

People treat Qatar Airways chiefs as products of the glass towers beside Hamad International.

Akbar Abbas Al Baker was born in Doha, according to the airline's own archived chief-executive page and to his later board biography at Vodafone Qatar.

The year most often printed is 1962.

That figure is not as firm as the city.

In an April 2021 interview with The Times he gave 25 July as the day and month and said he did not know the year.

A few Arabic and European pages place the birth in Mumbai instead.

The public record therefore splits on two points that biographies usually treat as settled.

What does not split is the city that raised him after school in India: Doha before the North Field gas boom made Qatar, on paper, the richest state per head on earth.

The house itself is not a published address.

Living-person rules keep it that way.

The pin is the standing market that still occupies the old commercial heart of the capital, Souq Waqif in Al Souq, a few hundred metres south of the Corniche that later landfill pushed out into the bay.

Traders used these lanes when the shoreline was closer.

The present masonry is a 2006-08 reconstruction that kept the timber and plaster look of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century souq and demolished the mid-century concrete that had grown over it.

A boy born here in the early 1960s would have known a smaller port, a Civil Aviation Directorate still running a single main airport, and no national long-haul airline.

That is the Doha he left for a boarding school in the Western Ghats, and the Doha he came back to as an accountant.

The later career sits a few kilometres east of these alleys: twenty-seven years as group chief executive, seven Skytrax World's Best Airline titles by the time he left, and a new airport on reclaimed Gulf.

The origin is older and quieter than the brand.

Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons