Earlier this year, the New York-headquartered consulting firm Mercer's Quality of Life report declared for the second consecutive year that Hyderabad is the best Indian city to live in. Hyderabad is still 138 spots below Vienna, the world's best city on quality of life.
With more than half the world's population living in cities, an increasingly popular debate on the internet is over this question: which is really the best city in the world to live in?
In India, as the shift to cities gather pace, the question is asked constantly. A new video (above) by Whack explores the statistics put forth by the report in greater detail.
Another aspect of this debate often goes the Delhi vs Mumbai route. In 2014, the YouTube channel Being Indian asked passersby in the national capital what they thought of the financial capital and vice versa. It was reduced to the usual binaries: Women are not safe in Delhi, there is no morality in Mumbai, and so on.
Last week, a Mumbai filmmaker from Kerala explored how he grew to love the city in a viral short film titled Why I Hate Bombay. Another viral video with over two million views documented the best omelette in India, which, it claimed, is to be found in New Delhi.
A Mumbai comic artist who went to Pune also got brief fame on the internet when he compared the two cities. "Pune has more Symbiosis colleges than we have vada pao thelas in Mumbai." Bystanders in Bengaluru asked a similar question cited food, good weather and no discrimination as reasons for the IT capital was the best city.
Statistics notwithstanding, cities around the world have a long way to go before they attain perfection. Here, Bill Nye described what an ideal city of the future would look like. His answer in short: Bicycles, we need more bicycles.
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