WASHINGTON: 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. ( Watch )

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.