Social life and patterns

Sector 17 is the city's heart and retail centre. It is a favourite haunt for the city inhabitants for an evening out and has many restaurants and hotels like the newly commissioned Taj Chandigarh. Sector 17, unlike other sectors in Chandigarh, has no residential areas and is designed exclusively as a shopping and office area. It is also renowned for its many shops which carry a huge diversity of goods including most Indian and foreign brands. Most of the shops in the main plaza cater to the upper segments, while the smaller shops and the Bridge Market have a more middle class clientele. To deal with the increasing pressure on sector 17, another commercial hub was developed in Sector 34.

Chandigarh also has outlets of worldwide chain restaurants like KFC, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, Domino's Pizza, Ruby Tuesday and Subway. Chandigarh has one multiplex, Fun Republic, located in Mani Majra NAC area, 10 km from sector 17. Many more multiplexes are coming up. Chandigarh has a number of movie theatres, viz. Batra (Sector 37), Kiran (Sector 22), Piccadilly (Sector 34), Nirman (Sector 32), Neelam (Sector 17), Jagat (Sector 17).

Chandigarh started out with 3 major hospitals - the PGI in Sector 12, the General Hospital in Sector 16, and Government Medical College & Hospital at Sector 32. PGI is most often regarded as the nation's best post-graduate medical institution. Recently, major health groups have built specialty and super-specialty private hospitals in the tricity, such as Fortis at Mohali and Max Healthcare at Panchkula.

One of the unusual and popular features of Chandigarh is the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, built over 30 years by Nek Chand, a former road supervisor, from items discarded during the construction of Chandigarh. Other popular tourist places are the Rose Garden in Sector 16, and Sukhna Lake in Sector 6. Sukhna Lake is an artificially created lake, extremely popular among the locals and tourists. The Government Museum and Art Gallery in Sector 10 houses art, sculpture and textiles from India's past as well as contemporary items. It also has a natural history museum inside the complex. There is the National Gallery of Portraits in Sector 17.

The two satellite cities of Chandigarh, Panchkula (in Haryana) and Mohali (in Punjab) house a major population operating in Chandigarh. Both these cities are virtually the parts of Chandigarh.