The Indian living room is the hardest room in the house to purify, and the reason is architectural rather than technical. It is rarely a room — it is a hall open to a dining area, a passage, often a kitchen and sometimes a balcony door that spends the evening open. The volume the purifier is actually being asked to treat is routinely two to three times what is printed on the box.
It is also the room with the most inflow. The front door opens repeatedly, the kitchen sends cooking particulate across, and street dust arrives through the balcony. A purifier here is not reaching a clean steady state and holding it; it is running against a continuous load.
Two practical consequences. First, size aggressively — take the claimed coverage, halve it for an open plan, and buy accordingly. Second, consider two mid-sized units at opposite ends of the space instead of one large unit in a corner. Two 250 m³/h units will out-clean one 450 m³/h unit in a long open-plan hall, because the limiting factor is air circulation, not raw capacity.
If you are buying one unit, 360-degree intake genuinely earns its premium here. It removes placement sensitivity in an irregular space where the only free corner is rarely the right one.