I did the Bangalore spreadsheet twice. The first time was for the money and the second time was to talk myself out of it, and I got the same answer both times, which is that the city would make me richer and my life smaller. I could not find the column where that counts as an upgrade, so I closed the laptop and stayed in Bagdogra.

I have never lived in Bangalore, so this is a visitor’s notebook and not a resident’s testimony. I have been going for twenty years, for work and weddings and airport layovers, and I know the airport road and the office parks and the balcony where the conversation always comes back to the same question, which is how much longer everyone is willing to keep doing this.

In the hills we pretend the slow life is a choice. In Bangalore nobody pretends, and within ten minutes everyone will tell you what they are building and how much they raised and why this is finally the year. After a place where ambition is impolite, there is a real relief in that.

But the honesty stops at the language. Nobody there is ashamed of money, and plenty of people are ashamed of saying so, which is why a job becomes a mission and a landlord becomes a builder. The city talks in the vocabulary of impact and does the arithmetic of rent.

It is also the least diverse place I know in the one way that matters. The food and the languages change every kilometre, and the wanting does not. Everyone wants the same flat and the same fund and the same second passport, and the ones who already have all three are the ones telling you to enjoy the journey.

Then you go and see the flats. The same glass tower and the same infinity pool and the same brochure that says resort-style living, and the resort is a balcony and the water comes by tanker. I have stood in three of those flats and I could not tell you which one belonged to which friend, because the only local thing in the room was the traffic outside.

Then you pay 400 rupees for a meal and sit in a room that could be in any city on earth, and for twenty minutes it works, and then you step outside and the road is still there. In plain English; you do not buy a life in that city, you rent the parts.

The traffic, though. Bengaluru was ranked the second most congested city on earth this year. Drivers lose 168 hours to it and average 16 km/h, which is a bicycle, and the state it sits in writes nearly half of India’s software exports. We have built a place that can sell code to the world and cannot move a person 10 kilometres in under an hour, and we call it world-class because the buildings are glass and the salaries are in dollars.

A life there is an assembly kit. The flat is private, the tanker is private, and so are the inverter, the RO, the car, the driver, the security, the school, the gym and the hospital. The pavement is the one thing left to the state, which is why it is also the one thing nobody has fixed.

The company provides the bus and the food and the doctor and the creche, and the road outside the gate is still the state’s problem, which is another way of saying it is nobody’s.

None of this is Bangalore’s fault, and I want to be careful here, because the city took the ambition of a generation and turned it into exports and confidence with almost no public city underneath it. The companies are world-class. Most of them are headquartered somewhere else. The road to the airport is not world-class. The metro is arriving late, the water table is going down, and the lakes froth over in the summer. The better the private city gets, the less pressure there is to fix the public one, because the people with the most voice have already bought their way around the problem, and the people with the least voice are the ones standing at the tanker.

And the city is the closest thing we have to a meritocracy, which is exactly what makes it so hard on the people who lose, because in a place like that the loser has nobody to blame but himself. That one took me a while.

Then the personal math, which is the only math I am qualified to do. The move from Bagdogra to Bangalore is lateral. I would earn more and spend more and sit in more traffic and breathe worse air and see my friends less, and the delta would show up in the bank account and nowhere else.

Its not that I romanticise Bagdogra either, so let me be fair to Bangalore. The internet here drops when it rains, the nearest hospital is a drive away, the airport has a short list of direct flights, and there is no scene. Bangalore has the bookshops, and better food than we will ever have, and at 11 p.m. you can find somebody to argue with about the Union budget. I will grant it all of that. (I have done the arguing and lost.)

Which is why, if I want a better life, I would rather move to a different country than move to another Indian city. The country I have in mind is one that has already solved the things Bangalore is still promising to solve, because if I am going to pay a world price for a flat and a commute then I want the world baseline that comes with it, which is clean air and a footpath and water that does not arrive by truck and a school where the teacher shows up.

I say this with no joy. I have spent my whole life here and I want India to be the place where I can have a good life, and the fact that I have to say it out loud is the whole problem.

And I can even think about that move because my work travels over a wire, which is a privilege the man who drives the cab does not have. Any argument about leaving that forgets that is just a rich man’s complaint dressed up as a life plan.

We keep measuring the country by the height of its towers, and the tower is fine, and the test is the pavement you walk on to reach it. A country is great when its best city is a good place for an ordinary person to be ordinary, and a NASDAQ listing does not substitute for that.

Bangalore is the best argument India has that we can build anything. The pavement outside the gate is the evidence that building anything is not the same as building a country.

So I stayed, because the delta did not justify the move, and because the upgrade I want is not for sale inside this country yet. I am not going to pretend Bagdogra is the better city. My duty is to the life I can actually live and the people I can actually help, and a pin code was never the unit of that.

If you made the move and love it, tell me what I got wrong. I would rather be talked out of this than be right about it. I am @troysk704.