Karim is a New Yorker, who always thought he would be a surgeon. That is, until the day before graduating from Bucknell University, where he specialized in molecular biology.

To kill time before graduate school, Karim first worked as the personal assistant to an amazing Japanese woman, Yuri Ichihashi, a designer and owner of a small, high-end jewelry-manufacturing firm in Manhattan.

Yuri's most distinctive design begins with 18K gold strands that are as thin as silk, which are then braided and woven according to ancient Japanese silk-weaving techniques to form gold "scarves" that feel like fabric. Besides teaching him how to run a business, Yuri taught Karim a lot about beauty. The influence of this introduction to the elegant simplicity of the Japanese aesthetic by a master designer remains with him still.

After parting on friendly terms with Yuri because he did not see his future in the jewelry industry, Karim taught biology in Brooklyn, rejected a stressed-out life in investment banking, and had a great time getting to know Manhattan's East Village.

Deciding after a long night of dancing to get into philosophy (not joking!), Karim was a master's candidate at Tufts University before transferring to MIT (the people are brilliant, but strange, and the connections are great), where he is now finishing up a doctorate in philosophy, specializing in political theory, and in particular democratic theory, philosophy of law, and global justice.

Though Karim's interest in Asia began with his love affair with Japanese design and film (i.e. the touching humanism of Akira Kurosawa groundbreaking films), the nature of Karim's interest in Asia changed with two big picture realizations: (1) That the world's fortunes would rise and fall with those of east Asia, and (2) that from the perspective of someone interested in institutional change, China was perhaps the most interesting place on the planet.

With these realizations as his guide, Karim spent some time covering Northeast Asian missile-defense politics for the Arms Control Reporter, a publication of the Cambridge-based Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, and spent a summer working with Edward S. Steinfeld, an MIT political economist and internationally renowned China specialist who examines, among other things, the impact of globalization on Chinese industrial policy and structure. Karim's present working interest in the region continues with his collaboration, as an organizer for the World Student Community for Sustainable Development, with students from the University of Tokyo.

Karim decided to get ORIENTED after a serendipitous meeting with Sean Molloy on the Chinatown bus from New York to Boston, and well, the rest will be written by history...