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Thursday, October 09
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Multiple gunshots echoed in the upscale home of an Indian family in a quiet, gated, suburban Los Angeles community last weekend, echo
ing the troubled times in America. ( Watch )
When police turned up on Monday morning after calls from a concerned neighbour waiting for a carpool ride, they found the body of 45-year old Karthik Rajaram, an unemployed financial advisor, lying in one room with a handgun he had used to shoot himself dead.
With him lay his two youngest sons Arjuna (7) and Ganesha (12), both shot dead. In different rooms across the house they found the bodies of Karthik’s wife Subasri (39), his mother-in-law Indra Ramasesham (69), and his eldest son Krishna (19). They all appeared to have been shot to death by Karthik Rajaram.
Police also found two suicide notes – one for the cops and one for extended family and friends -- and a will. In them, Rajaram he spoke of his financial difficulties and took responsibility for killing his family members, police said.
Police did not elaborate on the contents except to suggest that Rajaram appeared to be in dire financial straits.
''This is a perfect American family behind me that has absolutely been destroyed,'' LAPD Deputy Chief Michel Moore told reporters. ''It is critical to step up and recognize we are in some pretty troubled times.''
Rajaram had an MBA in finance from University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), and formerly worked for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Sony Pictures. But he had been unemployed for several months, according to local media reports citing authorities.
Investigators also determined that he was at least the part-owner of a financial holding company, SKGL LLC, which was incorporated in Nevada, ostensibly to hold his family assets.
The family appears to have been well-off at one time. According to the Los Angeles Times, they sold their home in Northridge in 2006 for $750,000, making a sizeable profit on a home they purchased in 1997 for $274,000. They had also taken out two loans for $241,400.
Rajaram once made more than $1.2 million in a London-based venture fund before he ran out of luck playing the stock market, reports said. A 2001 article in The Daily Telegraph of London, under the headline ''Bust, but big bucks for the big boys,'' called Rajaram a ''winner'' in a deal for NanoUniverse, a LA- and London-based venture fund taken public on the London Stock Exchange. For a 12,500-pound investment, Rajaram, one of the company's founders, received 875,000 pounds -- or about $1.2 million in 2001 dollars -- after a voluntary liquidation, the newspaper reported.
Although the family rented their current 2800-sq foot home, they lived a typical upper class life. They had two cars, a Chevy Suburban and a Lexus SUV and they reportedly paid their rent on time.
The incident sent shock waves through the neighbourhood, the larger Indian community and American financial world on a day the monetary world saw yet another bloodbath. Indians are widely known and recognized as the most successful ethnic community in the U.S with the highest per capita income among all segments of the population, including Whites.
But the country is now starting to hear of many hard luck stories, including among Indians, although nothing like this. And not in the City of Angels, far removed from the frenzied financial world of New York.
It wasn’t immediately clear if Rajaram’s extreme action stemmed from the ongoing economic turmoil, but even the police, unusually, referred to the troubled times. And as the story burnt the wires, the online community debated the incident heatedly.
''All the talk of bailouts for these big financial companies take the front page on all the papers, but the impact of the economic crisis on individuals is sometimes overlooked. This is a sad and tragic reminder of how quickly people can spiral into a horrible place,'' one blogger lamented.
Neighbours said the Rajarams were a quiet, decent family who pretty much kept to themselves and did not socialize much. The eldest son Krishna, a Fulbright scholar majoring in business economics at his father’s alma mater UCLA, appeared to be visiting home at the time of the incident.
Local school authorities said the two younger kids were also extremely bright and the parents had been very much involved in their education. The family did not appear to be particularly troubled, although some neighbors told reporters that Rajaram was pretty intense.
According to the police, there was no evidence that Rajaram had sought help from mental health professionals. However, the context of the letters and the fact Rajaram had purchased the handgun as recently as September 16 indicated that his actions were ''premeditated,'' they said.
''He had become despondent over his financial situation,'' Deputy Chief Moore related. In one of his letters, he talked of two options: taking his own life or taking his own life and that of his family. ''He talked himself into the second strategy,'' Moore said.
One of the neighbours reported that Rajaram had spoken to her twice in the last two weeks asking whether she would be home this past weekend. He urged her to keep her side windows shut because he had heard of burglaries in the area. He seemed nervous -- shaking, pacing and taking notes on a notepad as he spoke to her, she told the LA Times.
She surmised after the bloody massacre that he was trying to have her close her windows so that she wouldn't hear anything.
Apparently, no one did, because it was not until Monday when another neighbour rang the Rajarams' bell to remind Subasri, who worked at a local pharmacy, about the carpool ride did the tragic incident come to light.
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Tuesday, October 07
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A 35-year old Indian-American whiz whose parents migrated from Jammu and Kashmir is being entrusted with task of rescuing Wall Street,the US economy -- and the pretty much the entire financial world tied to its coat tails -- from a dizzying tailspin that is crushing markets and  people across the globe.
US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Monday named Neel Kashkari, currently the Assistant Secretary for International Affairs in the Department of Treasury, as the interim head for its new Office of Financial Stability, including the Troubled Asset Relief Program, to oversee the $700-billion bailout program aimed at arresting the US economy's precipitous slide arising from the mortgage crisis.
Kashkari is one of nearly half-dozen Indian-Americans, including Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, who have served in the Bush administration at Tier Two cabinet levels. But the new job clearly puts Kashkari in a different league altogether.
A long-time understudy and associate of Secretary Paulson going back to their days at Goldman Sachs, Kashkari was nominated as assistant secretary and confirmed by the Senate only in July this year in a little-noticed development at that time because it came at the tail-end of the Bush administration's eight-year run in office.
But the monumental crisis that has spooked Wall Street and the associated world has thrown the young Indian-American engineer-turned-financial expert into the spotlight. Hours before the appointment, the financial world and blogosphere was agog with the news of such a young man being tasked with such a huge task on a day the market continued its downward spiral.
"It seems a curious time to appoint a young acolyte from "The Firm" (Goldman Sachs) to run one of the most critical financial rescue programmes in US history," the Financial Times' blog Alphaville observed, noting Kashkari's substantial science background. "There is a small matter of experience. He is 35 years old and - if appointed and confirmed - will, as the Wall Street Journal points out, gain a 'position of substantial power' overseeing Treasury's effort to buy the financial industry's bad loans and other distressed securities."
On a day the Dow tanked 800 points at one point and went close to 9500, a wiseacre on Market Ticker forum wrote, "Seriously? The guy overseeing the $700 billion is named 'CashCarry'? You really can't make this stuff up..." The last time the Dow was below 10,000 was October 2004.
Kashkari has a bachelor's degree in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (birthplace of the original Internet browser Mosaic) and went to earn a master's degree in aerospace engineering to initially take up a career in sciences. He worked as the R&D Principal Investigator at the company TRW in Redondo Beach, California, where he developed technology for NASA space science missions such as James Webb Space Telescope, the replacement for Hubble, which is scheduled for launch in 2013.
But apparently, the call, or lure, of the finance world was so strong that he enrolled for an MBA at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1997. He then joined Goldman Sachs in San Francisco, where he led the firm's IT security investment banking practice, advising public and private companies on mergers and acquisitions and financial transactions, before moving to New York where he worked closely with then chairman and CEO Henry Paulson. When Paulson was named Treasury Secretary, he immediately drafted Kashkari as his senior advisor before he was appointed Assistant Secretary in July this this year.
Neel was born in Akron, Ohio, to Chaman and Sheila Kashkari, Indian immigrants originally from J&K, who took the well-trodden academic route to the United States. Chaman Kashkari, who taught at the University of Akron, is now a retired professor of engineering, and Sheila Kashkari is a pathologist. Neel's wife Minal works for defense contractor Lockheed Martin. The couple has been active in Republican circles with political contributions to the party.
Kashkari is now the second Indian at the heart of the US and world financial crisis. Vikram Pandit heads Citigroup which is now locked in a titanic battle with Wells Fargo over the acquisition of the bank Wachovia.
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