Are you sure you are not conflating the meaning of the word "democracy" to different issues, including quality of life, climate, infrastructure etc?

There's no way you can evaluate how good/bad democracy is in any country, in 3 weeks.

I didn’t make any statement on their democracy. I questioned by what metric are they the best and I commented that Hyderabad and Chennai are not a place I would take my family.

Not sure how you took that to be any kind of judgement on India’s democracy.

> By what metric are they the best democracy?

I'm not sure what else you meant by that.

While i'm not well versed in politics and democracies around the world, i have seen a common person protest against the government, get over whelming public support, start his own party and go on to become the chief minister of Delhi all within a span of 5-7 years. I know for sure that isn't possible in the US.

Bill Clinton was a common person. While he didn't start his own political party, he radically changed the Democratic party into a more conservative form, and got himself elected President.

Was Bill Clinton appreciably more conservative than Jimmy Carter, the last Dem President before Clinton?

Very much so. Clinton trimmed the welfare rolls, cut the number of federal employees, deregulated finance, deregulated telecom (though Carter was also a major deregulator, having deregulated airlines, trucking, and beer), signed NAFTA, signed DADT, signed DOMA, signed RFRA, passed aggressive violent crime legislation, etc.

Indian cities are a mess for a very different reason - they dont have elected city governments - you might ask why but the answer is too detailed to give here.

I am pretty sure we have municipal elections here.