Nibeditaa SpeaksCan education take place outside of classrooms, campuses and examinations? A Bengaluru-based initiative is testing that concept out, one bar at a time.
On most evenings, a bar is a place to unwind after work. At a Pint of View (PoV) gathering, however, the setting takes on a different character. Tables become makeshift lecture seats, drinks sit alongside notebooks, and conversations can move from bat ecology and neuroscience to history, literature, art and space science.
The idea is simple but unusual: create a space where adults can learn without worrying about examinations, grades, credits or whether the subject will improve their résumé.
Founded in 2025 by Harsh Snehanshu, Shruti Sah and Meghna Choudhary, Pint of View drew inspiration from the New York-based Lectures on Tap. Its first event, Bats & Booze, took place at Indiranagar Social in Bengaluru on August 24, 2025. The evening featured bat researcher and conservationist Dr Rohit Chakravarty and attracted around 60 people.
What began as an experiment has since expanded. PoV now has chapters in Bengaluru and 11 other Indian cities, along with an international presence. The Bengaluru chapter alone hosts around 12 lectures a month, with venues often accommodating between 100 and 200 people.
But the more intriguing story is not that people are willing to attend lectures in bars. It is that they are willing to spend their free time learning about subjects that may have no obvious connection to their jobs, salaries or careers.
Learning after the degree
Modern education is increasingly organised around outcomes. Students pursue degrees to qualify for jobs, collect credits, clear examinations and build credentials. Universities measure performance through grades, rankings, placements and research output.
But what happens when the degree is over?
For many adults, structured learning becomes much harder to access. Curiosity does not necessarily disappear with graduation, but the institutions built around formal learning often become less accessible.
Pint of View is attempting to occupy that space.
It does not seek to recreate a university classroom in a different location. Instead, it removes many of the hierarchies associated with formal education and creates an environment where people can simply show up because they want to know more.
The choice of venue is part of the idea. A bar is informal, social and accessible in a way that a university lecture hall may not be for someone who is no longer a student.
The result is an unusual combination: serious ideas in an unstructured setting.
No grades, no credits, just curiosity
PoV has also drawn a distinction between an intellectual lecture and the increasingly common culture of motivational talks and self-help sessions.
Its programming focuses on academics, researchers and practitioners with substantial expertise in their fields. The objective is not to teach audiences how to become more successful, productive or wealthy, but to introduce them to ideas that they may never encounter in their professional lives.
That distinction appears to matter.
A lecture on the relationship between science and gender, for instance, does not need to be simplified merely because the audience is not made up of specialists. Similarly, a discussion about satellite operations can become an opportunity for an audience to ask questions that may never arise in a conventional professional setting.
The format allows speakers to explore subjects with greater freedom while giving audiences permission to be curious without having to demonstrate prior knowledge.
Why would anyone pay to learn about bats?
This may be the most interesting question surrounding the experiment.
A lecture on bats is unlikely to add a line to a corporate résumé. A discussion on art history may not lead to a promotion. Learning about Mars may have no immediate financial return.
Yet people continue to attend.
That suggests there is a demand for something that modern education often struggles to measure: learning for its own sake.
For much of their lives, students are taught to ask what a particular subject will do for them. Will it help them clear an examination? Will it get them into college? Will it lead to a better job? Will it increase their salary?
Pint of View turns that logic around.
The value of learning, in this setting, does not have to be justified by an economic outcome.
Reclaiming public spaces for ideas
There is also something culturally significant about taking serious intellectual conversations out of institutional spaces.
Universities have traditionally been centres of public debate and knowledge exchange. But access to those conversations can become limited once people leave formal education.
PoV brings those conversations into spaces people already inhabit socially.
The setting may be a bar, but the underlying proposition is remarkably traditional: people are naturally curious, and education does not necessarily need an examination at the end to be meaningful.
Its expanding network suggests that the appetite for such conversations extends beyond Bengaluru. With chapters across India and international expansion underway, the initiative is testing whether informal intellectual communities can develop outside universities.
The classroom doesn’t necessarily end at graduation
Education systems are increasingly evaluated through measurable outcomes—entrance scores, rankings, placements, salaries and employability.
Curiosity is harder to measure.
There is no certificate for discovering an unexpected fact about bats. No promotion follows automatically from learning about the history of art. There is no examination score attached to understanding how a satellite works.
And yet these experiences can change the way people see the world.
That may be the larger idea behind Pint of View.
It is not necessarily trying to replace universities or challenge formal education. Instead, it is creating another route into knowledge for people who have already left the classroom but have not left their curiosity behind.
Perhaps education does not really end when the degree is awarded.
Sometimes, the classroom simply moves somewhere else.
Sometimes, it moves to a bar.
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