India, Nov. 19 -- Chandigarh is witnessing a spate of cultural events to become a living city rather than merely an architectural entity. These events include music concerts, theatre festivals, book launches, film screenings, and gallery openings. These events, regardless of form, are vital to a city's rhythm. They define its evenings, animate its public spaces and engage citizens to encounter art and ideas. However, the nature of this impact varies depending on the event's organising logic. The first kind - slickly produced, often curated by event management firms or private foundations - thrives on visibility and glamour. The aesthetic is polished, the production quality high, and the experience designed to be consumable, visually appealing, media-friendly, and socially desirable, like Ismat Apa Ke Naam by Naseeruddin Shah, book launch of Sam Dalrymple, etc. These are usually attended by the urban elite -business leaders, retired bureaucrats, socialites, media professionals, and established academics and artists. Attendance often requires invitations, memberships, or ticketed access, signalling exclusivity and distinction. The audience's role is largely spectatorial: They consume the performance or artwork as an experience. It is a form of cultural gentrification, a symbol of belonging to the city's cultural class. In these events, the conversations are part of the performance-moderated to avoid controversies. The second - university and civic society organised events are knowledge-oriented, provoke thought and expand artistic inquiry. Their audience largely consists of students, researchers, emerging artists, and socially engaged citizens. Access is usually free or open, fostering inclusivity rather than exclusivity. The audience here becomes participants. They engage in question-and-answer sessions, panel discussions, and collective debates. No doubt the university hosted theatre festivals or public humanities conclaves or lectures on economy might not draw large crowds or media coverage, but sustain cultural conscience and cognitive thoughts. Both are essential for the city. Without the first, urban life becomes dull; without the second, it becomes hollow. And there is another hybrid version - like literary festivals that mix scholarship with accessibility - and combine sponsorship with social critique. Now the question, shall these events transform Chandigarh from an architectural island into a heritage city? Perhaps, not on their own. A dense year-round festivals/events calendar does not equal cultural integration, it equals cultural over-scheduling without roots. A modern city does not become a cultural hub merely by hosting a flurry of events - book launches, film festivals, theatre productions, and art exhibitions. These may provide visibility, but actual cultural vitality arises when creativity becomes intertwined with everyday urban life. They must emerge from, and feed back into, the city's organic social life. Heritage is a collective and collaborative interactive enterprise. It is more than even the hybrid balance between the glamour and gravity of thought. The inequality is perpetuated under the cover of heritage preservation, where the living city is pushed to the southern sectors like vegetable markets, bus stand, lower court, waste heaps, and artificial lake (for Chaath Puja). It is all done to preserve the heritage city to keep the northern sectors clean, pollution-free, low-density habitation, monumental architecture, well-maintained parks, and controlled mobility as a museum of modernisation. This creates an imbalance in heritage for some and not for all. A genuinely people-centred cultural and heritage ecosystem cannot be built through festivals alone; it requires structural change. First, cities must decentralise culture by creating accessible neighbourhood-level spaces - community libraries, studios, small theatres (many more Tagore Theatres), and open public squares - so that cultural practice is part of everyday life, not an occasional event. Second, planning must integrate the people who are usually excluded: Migrant workers, informal vendors, resettlement colonies, and low-income neighbourhoods. Their stories, crafts, languages, foodways, and rituals must be recognised as cultural assets, not inconveniences. Third, cultural policy should shift from short-lived spectacle to long-term capacity-building: Funding for local artists, mentorship programmes, school-based cultural education, and permanent archives documenting lived heritage. The need, therefore, is to enrich citizens' lives by turning streets, libraries, cafes and public squares into arenas of exchange and storytelling. And also reshape Chandigarh's architecture to shelter creativity, and its people see culture as a shared way of living-not just a spectacle to attend. Unfortunately, there is no organic stimulus visible in Chandigarh to become a cultural hub, as a highly bureaucratised and centralised State apparatus drives it. Even the inhabitants have neither a sense of belonging to the city nor ownership of cultural activities. Integrating these into the urban core affirms that everyday life is part of heritage. However, heritage must be understood as people, memory, and landscape, not only architecture. Only when cultural life is embedded structurally, socially, and spatially can festivals enhance rather than substitute real urban heritage....