'Pint of View': Attend An Event Series That Sees Scholars Delivering Lectures In Bars
After a long day of work, the common refrain is that people want to switch off — to zone out, binge-watch something familiar, or scroll until sleep. Rest, we are told, is the opposite of work. But what if it isn’t? Often, the thing that pulls us out of fatigue is not absence of stimulation but a different kind of it: conversations that engage us, ideas that provoke us, and stories that make us look at the world differently. The opposite of work is not rest but play, and play can mean indulging our minds in ways that feel enlivening rather than draining.
That might explain why house parties so often turn into impromptu seminars. A few drinks in, the surface chatter fades, and suddenly the table is alive with talk about history, science, culture or politics. These conversations, unplanned and a little messy, are more animated than any classroom we’ve sat in. They are reminders that our curiosity and imagination is not something we grow out of, nor something reserved for institutions. It thrives when it is given space, even in the most unlikely settings.
Pint of View takes that idea and turns it into a public format. Launched in Bengaluru in 2025, the series invites scholars, scientists, and artists to give short lectures inside bars. It is an experiment in moving ideas out of institutions and into social spaces, with the hope that learning can feel more accessible when it is woven into everyday leisure. The idea is not unique to India. A year earlier in New York, Lectures on Tap began experimenting with the same formula: bringing academics into pubs and asking them to compress their work into lively, forty-minute talks. Pint of View’s arrival in India quickly showed how well the idea travels — sold-out events and packed rooms suggest that there is an appetite for intellectual life beyond classrooms and conferences.
Pint of View was founded in August 2025 by Harsh Snehanshu (entrepreneur), Meghna Chaudhary (software engineer), and Shruti Sah (brand marketing specialist and documentary filmmaker), all of whom had experience building community-based projects in Bengaluru. They launched the first lecture, Bats & Booze: The Secret Lives of Bats, on August 24 in Bengaluru, with the aim of creating experiences in bars that bring experts closer to people outside academia. Today, Pint of View runs in multiple Indian cities — besides Bengaluru, events are held in Delhi and Mumbai, with plans to expand to Hyderabad, Noida, and Goa.
The lectures themselves are deliberately wide-ranging. Past sessions have included talks on bat ecology, the history of weaving textiles in India, and the philosophy of self-reflection. By hosting them in bars, the organisers ensure that the mood remains more informal than the hierarchy of a class.
This is also a response to a larger cultural shift here. In recent years, the phrase “it’s not that deep” has become shorthand for discouraging analysis or reflection. It speaks to a climate of casual anti-intellectualism, where being curious or thoughtful is often framed as pretentious or cringe. Against this backdrop, Pint of View resists that nonchalance. By staging intellectual work in a setting associated with ease and pleasure, it normalises the idea that thinking deeply, and caring about things in the world that are outside your circle of interests, is pretty cool.
In doing so, Pint of View is repackaging academia with the the joy of drinking with your friends reminding us that intellectual life can be public, participatory, and convivial. It also says something about the way our generation approaches leisure. Switching off doesn’t just mean zoning out anymore — it often means choosing what stimulates us in the right way. Whether it’s the music we put on, the aesthetics we surround ourselves with, or the tastes we cultivate, our time off has become more intentional. Paintandsip workshops, pottery-with-wine evenings, and other creative-drink hybrids are popping up across cities because people want more than passive downtime. In that sense, Pint of View extends this cultural shift into the intellectual sphere where we can finally accept and embrace the nerd within.
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