It’s a Sunday night in Bengaluru and conservationist Rohit Chakravarty is talking to a crowded room about bats. He’s not at a university or in lecture hall but at a bar, with the room looking like a college classroom disguised as a cocktail party, or maybe the other way around.
Pint of View is a new event series in Bengaluru where university professors and experts give lectures in bars. It is inspired by the Lectures on Tap series in the US, which is so popular in New York, Boston and Chicago that it sells out weeks in advance.
You get to listen to an expert speak about quantum gravity or the search for alien megastructures, but instead of a classroom atmosphere, you find yourself in a bar. No one will ask you to lower your voice, and you can laugh, ask unusual questions, slip sideways into metaphor, with a drink in your hand.
Pint of View was created last month by entrepreneur Harsh Snehanshu, software engineer Meghna Chaudhary, and brand marketing specialist and documentary filmmaker Shruti Sah, who have a reputation for building unique communities in Bengaluru. Their silent reading community, Cubbon Reads, launched similar reading communities in cities like Mumbai and Delhi. Snehanshu and Sah also started Bookmark in November 2023, a dating app for book lovers.
“There was this natural inclination to build another community,” says Chaudhary. “We wanted to get closer to a new set of people. All our communities make public spaces feel more interesting and fun and this time we decided to create experiences in a bar.”
Do scientists say things in a bar that they wouldn’t at a conference? You’d be surprised. In the first Pint of View lecture on 24 August in Bengaluru, Bats and Booze: The Secret Lives of Bats, Chakravarty mentions that he never hangs out in bars but this is an exception he is glad to make. Out here, he can take science to people outside his academic circles—young professionals, authors, freelancers, techies, teachers, social workers, marketing executives and polymaths who wind down and socialise on weekends over drinks.
Chakravarty talks about how bats accurately detect the distance of objects in milliseconds, the feeling he had when he rescued a bat for the very first time, different species of bats, why they live where they do, and their interesting social lives.
This first lecture in Bengaluru sold out immediately and there is huge demand for the upcoming lectures, which Snehanshu plans to hold every week or every fortnight. “We will not record our lectures because we are curating an experience and building a community,” says Snehanshu.
Pint of View now has lectures up and running in bars in Mumbai and Delhi and will travel to Hyderabad, Noida and Goa. On 31 August, Pint of View Delhi had a lecture by boudoir photographer Mozail titled The Lost Art of Looking at Yourself.
The lectures, restricted to 60 guests, are ticketed and announced on Urbanaut. All lectures happen in bars between 4-6pm when the spaces are less crowded. Pint of View Bengaluru plans to make a few exceptions. In an upcoming lecture, people can sip drinks and walk through a celebrated carpet collector’s home museum and touch heritage carpets from the Old Silk Route.
Shweta Sharan is a freelance journalist based in Bengaluru.