-- In India there is an undeniable and strong tendency to construct narratives of how everything good in the world was discovered in India. All Indians don't share this perspective, in fact it is shared by a minority, but er, that amounts to 150 million people or something.
-- This tendency is inward, not outward looking. This politician Harsh Vardhan is a fuck up, like a lot of Indian politicians. But generally this thinking is not directed at bragging to the rest of the world about how great India is, rather it is to nurse, heal, revive people's connections with their own trampled culture and history -- one that in recent times is increasingly being supplanted by a pseudo-western culture and western lifestyle. It's a way of telling people in India to give their intellectual heritage another chance.
-- Honestly, most rational people don't give a damn about where the Pythagorus theorem was invented. I mean if it were an easily provable fact, then it might be an interesting piece of historical information, but given that it's ambiguous who cares, unless to stoke one's nationalist ego.
-- The Princeton mathematician who won the Fields Medal... which is like a Nobel prize except that it's given once every 4 years... is a reference because of his grasp of mathematics, not because he's Indian. If you think of him as "some Indian guy trying to pocket a laurel for his fatherland" then that's a strong statement about you, not about him.
