There was a big buzz in the chess world at the time, but it was hardly front-page material for mainstream media.

That said, of course, newsworthiness is not a competition - so congrats to both youngsters for their awesome achievements. The upcoming chess generation is looking promising! (I expect we'll see similar headlines for Alireza Firouzja someday soon)

* https://www.imdb.com/india/top-rated-indian-movies/

And because of the large population, even a small percentage would still be a large number.

But individual Indians do that on their own independent will though.

There's no central authority that declares to Indians "Ooh here's a new content about India. Go go go!"

India probably have the best cricket team in the world right now and they have depth. Their second eleven might be in the top 5. They are awesome and a period of India being the top dog is a good thing for cricket. (Some friendly played, properly tense games against Pakistan would make it even better, we can't have everything).

   India pop 1,380 million
   NZ pop 5 million
   Norway also about 5 million

In the end what matters to perception may be the attendant fuss, as you say with commentators and organised competition, but I grew up with the Football Pyramid†, which provokes healthy distrust of such things in trying to define a sport.

† Unlike with US sports like the NFL, in England Soccer is organised in a vast sprawling hierarchy of leagues, the Pyramid, with a system for teams to be promoted from a lower league to a higher one, or contrariwise demoted to a lower league, depending on their performance each season. Anybody can start at the bottom, if they can put together a group of people to turn up and play. In principle a group of friends or colleagues could create a new side, "Speen and Dean FC", that was just ridiculously good, and get promoted every season, until after a few yeares they were playing against semi-professionals, and then facing actual professional footballers in stadiums, and then playing internationals, it's all possible. Incredibly unlikely of course, but possible. And so this emphasises that actually the game you're playing kick-about with some friends, is the exact same game somebody gets paid eyewatering sums of money to play on national TV. If it's a "serious sport" is clearly just a matter of perspective.

I'm french and if I read any comments section of any english article about France, I'll find tons of negative comments like "cheese eating surrender monkey", "their tanks have 1 forward and 7 reverse gear" and so on. And I only speak about the comments section, the worse are article from Murdoch's empire which plainly insult us, generating tons of money along the way because it sells well.

This type of comments is also found on indian based website, and that is super strange because India and France have not been involved together, we do not share a common history which would allow the introduction of jokes making fun of one another.