A recent search on Buckminster Fuller brought out a completely new fact to me. On further search on that topic on Google, and I realized that it is a little known piece of trivia.

The origins of the US Flag, the Stars and Stripes has a connection to India.

In this excerpt from R. Buckminster Fuller’s _ Critical Path _(Copyright 1981 by R. Buckminster Fuller pp. xxi to xxii), Fuller writes

By pure chance I happened to uncover this popularly unknown episode of American history. Commissioned in 1970 by the Indian government to design new airports in Bombay, New Delhi, and Madras, I was visiting the grand palace of the British fortress in Madras, where the English first established themselves in India in 1600. There I saw a picture of Queen Elizabeth I and the flag of the East India Company of 1600 A.D., with its thirteen red and white horizontal stripes and its superimposed crosses in the upper corner. What astonished me was that this flag (which seemed to be the American flag) was apparently being used in 1600 A.D., 175 years before the American RevolutiOn Displayed on the stairway landing wall together with the portrait of Queen Elizabeth I painted on canvas, the flag was paint- ed on the wall itself, as was the seal of the East India Company.

This is the flag that Buckminster Fuller is talking about.

More on this flag here and here

Fuller goes on to layout the possible cause for the similarity between the latter day Stars and Stripes.

The supreme leaders of the American Revolution were of the southern type-George WashingtOn and Thomas Jefferson Both were great land- owners with direct royal grants for their lands, in contradistinction to the relatively meager individual landholdings of the individual northern Puritan colonists.