Gone are the days when bars were only thought of as places where you could go for a drink after a hard day’s work. Now, you can head into a watering hole on the weekend, and even indulge in an academic lecture on particle physics, the lives of bats, in-depth journalism, AI in politics, history of numismatics, or anything that might catch your fancy.
In such settings, loud music and inebriated exchanges are not the loudest thing in the room — the mic of the lecturer or the subject matter expert, always decorated with multiple degrees and qualifications, and the questions of the audience, take over the space.
Leading this trend in India are organisers like UnLecture, Pint of View and Society of Intellectuals. They hold such events largely in cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad in restaurants and bars like The Piano Man Jazz Club, Depot48, and Social.
In the US, popularising this movement is Lectures on Tap, an event series that runs mostly in pubs where lecturers and academics come in to enjoy talks and PowerPoint presentations on pedagogical subjects. Another noted lecture community is Pint of View (PoV), which has found its way to India as well.
Ayushi Misra and Anmol Grace, curators of PoV’s Delhi chapter, emphasise that the venue itself is central to the concept. Grace argues that bars remove the intimidation associated with academic settings, encouraging audiences to ask questions and engage more freely with speakers.
“We started small, tested the idea and let the audience tell us. The response made it clear that there was a real appetite for lectures outside traditional academic spaces,” adds Misra.
Similarly, Society of Intellectuals (SoI) emerged from a desire to create spaces where “knowledge itself is the celebrity”, encouraging meaningful conversations in an era dominated by digital distractions. Muskan Bhalla, founder of the community that is now operational in Mumbai and Pune, says: “I wanted to create a community because there was a gap… even right now, we don’t have good avenues to gain good knowledge.” In their events, they have covered subjects such as film criticism, storytelling, entomology, psychology and science.
Bhalla says that the primary aim of SoI is to make these subjects more accessible. “We encourage our lecturers to avoid using too much technical jargon, use mass communication aids like flowcharts, animations, anecdotal aids and so on.” Additionally, rather than oversimplifying the matter, the goal is to make specialist knowledge enjoyable for wider audiences.
This is what Keya Seth, a 32-year-old graphic designer, felt. Even though she attended a lecture on particle physics simply on a whim, as she “was looking for an out-of-the-box experience, and randomly came across the event on social media”, the talk turned out to be “not only informative, but also interesting for those coming from different professional backgrounds”.
“You tend to judge the potential of the lecture less by the subject matter beforehand, and the bar setting is already a factor that works in its favour,” she adds.
Mishka Lepps, co-founder of UnLecture, agrees. She says that taking learning into informal settings makes people feel more comfortable and “removes the inhibitions often associated with formal classrooms”. UnLecture combines expert talks with interactive discussions, audience participation and informal conversations over food and drinks. The initiative is seeing its fair share of success across Delhi-NCR.
The founders have called UnLecture an experiment to attempt to disrupt the traditional lecture format by testing it in spaces where people naturally gather to socialise, helping build communities centred on curiosity and conversation. The experiment, it seems, is already working.