Some public universities like the IIT's, some NIT's, ISI (Indian Statistical Institute, not the intelligence agency), and some other public schools in other fields are prestigious. The public K-12 schools are mostly a joke.
Completely agree with this statement. I work in HFT and have Indians asking me all the time: "what should I do to get a quant job or a low latency C++ job?". 99.9% of these folks have zero interest in Math (good luck being a quant) or have zero interest/passion in low level systems programming (good luck developing low latency systems). All they care about is the prestige and high pay in the HFT industry, and that if they can have a exam-like route to crack the interviews, they'll go forth and cram the hell out of things. No thanks, we don't want folks like that.
It's mostly them dancing on "see ISRO launches satellites for so much more less cost!". Like PPP, labor and material costs being much expensive in the US are not factors that exist.
Indian here. Your exchange doesn't surprise me one bit. The Hindu nationalists are some of the most delusional, ultra-nationalistic, racist morons out there.
Many of them think India is going to be the next superpower and economic miracle out there. There's a large number of them working in big tech, and they'll say how fantastic India is, now that there are very high-paying tech jobs available there (almost all of them in American companies) and this gives them fantastic standards of living because they can easily afford maids and cooks aka cheap labor they can exploit. I scratch my head and wonder, if India is so good WTF are they still doing here, while also working on their Green Card petitions?