Business Nepal

There was no Black Monday in Katmandu. When panic hit the great stock markets in New York and Tokyo and London last month and sent the price of shares tumbling, the tiny Nepal Securities Exchange stood as solid as the Himalayan mountains that tower over Katmandu. Shares in the Yak and Yeti, a local hotel, remained unchanged--and unavailable. Someone who bought into Nepal Bank a year ago for the equivalent of $4 a share could have sold easily for nearly five times that figure.

There was no Black Monday in Katmandu. When panic hit the great stock markets in New York and Tokyo and London last month and sent the price of shares tumbling, the tiny Nepal Securities Exchange stood as solid as the Himalayan mountains that tower over Katmandu. Shares in the Yak and Yeti, a local hotel, remained unchanged--and unavailable. Someone who bought into Nepal Bank a year ago for the equivalent of $4 a share could have sold easily for nearly five times that figure.

In something of a classic immigrant story, the boy from Nepal arrived in America at age 19, attended Cal State Long Beach, studied computer science and got a job in the early 1980s at then-struggling Disney, which was just beginning to use computer graphics. Over the next two decades, Kiran Joshi rose through the animation ranks, working on "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King," "Aladdin," "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Atlantis" until he was eventually made Disney's head of production for several digital projects.

Ramesh Khadka began the journey to his slaughter in this valley of rivers, where green rice terraces march up the mountains like stairs toward the heavens. After passing among a series of shadowy, indifferent middlemen, he finished it a month later in a dusty ditch in western Iraq. There, bound and helpless, the teenager was shot three times in the back of the head by insurgents, his execution and that of 11 of his countrymen captured on videotape.