Sandip Roy
New America Media

Neel Kashkari, 35, MBA. Job Experience – Goldman Sachs, TRW, U.S. Treasury.

Karthik Rajaram, 45, MBA, Job Experience – PriceWaterhouseCoopers, NanoUniverse, Azur Partners LLC.

In another life they could have known each other, traded business cards. Successful professionals with all the trappings of the model minority. The kinds that can own a home in a gated community with a Lexus SUV in the driveway. Indian-American median family income rose from $87,484 in 2006 to $92,925 in 2007. Kashkari and Rajaram should have been examples of those statistics.

But instead they have become the two faces of America's economic collapse – the two horsemen of our apocalypse.

Kashkari is the $700 billion man – the knight on the white horse heading the rescue of collapsing corporations. Except it was too late for Rajaram.

Rajaram, unemployed, his savings wiped out in the market collapse killed his three sons, wife, and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself in a 2,800 square foot house in an upscale California neighborhood.

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Editor's Note: Karthik Rajaram, the unemployed father and husband who recently killed his three sons, wife, and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself, has much in common with another Indian American, Neel Kashkari, who has been selected to head the Treasury's new Office of Financial Stability. When banks go bust, the American dream implodes - not just in NASDAQ indexes, but also in tidy suburbs and quiet, gated communities, writes NAM editor Sandip Roy.