Plagiarism

once I knew an indian mathematicians who plagiarised. in two of his books he copied verbatim once from a published book and the second time from a lecture notes without proper acknowledgements andmisleading references in the notes at the end. He was in a position of power and when the plagiarism came to be known among the scientific circles in india, the re@ctions were muted. He in fact a promotion but seems to have lost his administrative power in the institute where he worked. But many scientists who usually find that somebody like Trump plagiarised did not find fault with him and celebrated his birthdays. Once apparently one of his earlier teachers asked him why he did it and his response was that so and so was impossible to improve and he did not want to waste his time. This was reported to me and I do not really know whether it was true. I recently saw an interview with him and nearly thirty years after the incident, he mentions the books and said that he was asked to publish one of them in some series but it did not materializ. There did not seem to be any sense of guilt or responsibility. May be he really thought that it was a waste of time to try to improve on excellent expositions.