Living Rooms, Cafes, and Bars are Becoming the New Concert and Lecture Halls

There's a question that keeps emerging in India's metropolitan corridors, articulated best by Sukanya Banerjee of Delhi's Upstairs With Us, who has hosted 26 classical music baithaks in their Vasant Kunj living room since relaunching in 2025. "That's kind of like saying that you're only allowed to watch the India-Pakistan World Cup cricket match if you are a cricketer yourself." She's talking about classical music, but she might as well be describing the state of intellectual culture writ large, increasingly ghettoised in institutions, increasingly alienating to anyone outside the academic industrial complex. The answer, it turns out, isn't to water down the art. It's to change the room.

Across India, a constellation of initiatives is staging what Ayushi Misra, co-curator of Pint of View Delhi, calls an experiment in making learning "feel more accessible when it is woven into everyday leisure." Pint of View began in Bengaluru, inspired by America's "Lectures on Tap" movement, and now operates chapters in 11 cities, with Anmol Grace and Ayushi Misra helming the Delhi iteration.

Similarly, Kaapi Raagam, part of iktaraa Music’s ecosystem in Chennai, brings Carnatic concerts to coffee shops. Unlecture, started by three alumni of St Stephen’s College, Mishka Lepps, Sonalika Aggarwal, and Kezia Anna Mammen,stages intellectual discourse in bars, cafes and non-quotidian spaces across the capital. What unites them isn't simply venue disruption. It's a recognition that the spaces we learn in shape what and whether we learn at all.

The Paradox of the Auditorium Space

The irony isn't lost on anyone involved. Delhi, as Sukanya notes, is "buzzing with music", India Habitat Centre, Kamani Auditorium, India International Centre and more such spaces host free classical concerts almost regularly. Chennai's Margazhi season features more than 3,000 concerts across 45 major venues, making it one of the largest classical music festivals globally. "Classical music is routinely happening in halls all around Delhi, open-air concerts all around Delhi," Sukanya observes. "But if you don't know what they are, and if you don't know where to look for them, you never find out."

“The problem, then, isn't availability. It's accessibility,” she argues, "happens because the community is very insular. There are very few points of access for people who are uninitiated." The auditorium, that temple of high culture, becomes paradoxically exclusionary precisely through its formality. "Auditoriums and formal spaces where you listen to music get intimidating real fast."

The Unlecture team encountered the same phenomenon with intellectual discourse. After leaving Delhi University for "basic corporate jobs," they found themselves intellectually starved. "We realised that we are not learning much in corporate beyond the confines of what our job demands of us anymore," one of the co-founders explained. "We missed that critical thinking, questioning thing that we had back in college." The interest in ideas, as she puts it, "doesn't end with college, only the access to those spaces does."

The Grammar of Informality

What happens, then, when you move a raga from the concert hall to the living room? When you relocate Foucault from the seminar room to the bar? The first thing, crucially, is that nothing essential has changed. Damo from the Kaapi Raagam team is emphatic on this point: "We cater to the audience, but we don't pander to the audience." It's a distinction worth parsing. His Kaapi Raagam concerts in Chennai coffee shops don't truncate compositions or simplify ragas. "We are really not into the dilution of the art form," he insists. "We want to keep it as original as possible whilst allowing it room to evolve."

Similarly, the Unlecture team refuses the logic of popularisation-as-dumbing-down. "We don't believe in watering things down," they state flatly. "Whenever lecturers are worried about 'Will this make sense? This is quite technical,' we're like, no, this audience likes to be challenged."

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What changes isn't content but context. At Upstairs With Us, when someone arrives late, drenched from monsoon rains, they're handed a towel. When hunger strikes mid-performance, dinner materialises. "You can't listen with undivided attention if you're hungry or uncomfortable," Sukanya notes with the practicality of someone who understands that intellectual engagement requires physical comfort. The concerts, freed from the tyranny of the scheduled hall, stretch to two hours or more, not because they're indulgent, but because "that is something that is the result of attention."

In Chennai's coffee shops, Kaapi Raagam achieves something similar through different means. Artists explain compositions, contextualise composers, and field questions. The space signals approachability without compromising depth. As Damo observes, the coffee shop "makes it very accessible to anybody who wants to be a part of it." Where sabhas might be read as exclusive to the uninitiated, not through explicit gatekeeping but through the weight of tradition, a cafe says: this is a space for everyone.

The Economics of Attention

The business case for these ventures initially seemed dubious. Bars and cafes, after all, thrive on turnover. A lecture that keeps 60 people seated for two hours represents a significant opportunity cost. Yet venues, the Unlecture team reports, increasingly approach them rather than the reverse. "Now we find a lot of interest on like other people working with us," they note. "It's more like building a cultural sort of thing now."

The same logic applies to artists. Of the 25 concerts Upstairs With Us hosted in 2025, 24 were initiated by musicians reaching out to them. "Every single person we have hosted has been somebody who reached out and said, hey, I want this," Sukanya reveals. The appeal isn't primarily financial, though fair payment is foundational to the model. It's the quality of listening.

"If you give me a choice between somebody who really understands and honestly doesn't care about what's happening and somebody who doesn't understand what's happening, but is going to give me undivided attention, I would take the latter every time," Sukanya argues. This inverts the traditional hierarchy of classical music appreciation, which privileges knowledge over presence. What Upstairs With Us offers artists is something increasingly rare: an audience that actually listens.

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The same dynamic plays out at Pint of View events. "What surprised us most was not attendance, though sold-out rooms were encouraging, but attentiveness," Anmol Grace notes. "No one is distracted, no one is trying to leave early." The Q&A sessions, they've discovered, are as engaging as the lectures themselves. The format succeeds not despite its informality but because of it.

True engagement is counterintuitive in an age of algorithmic distribution, where cultural products are optimised for virality. But spaces like these point to a different theory of cultural change, one predicated not on reaching millions but on creating conditions where depth becomes possible. As one Unlecture founder puts it, the goal is making intellectual engagement "purely interesting," ensuring that "in the middle, you don't want people getting bored."

The stereotype that people emerging from work want only distraction? "What we observed was the opposite," Ayushi Misra notes. "The appetite to think and engage is very much alive." A couple spent their 25th wedding anniversary at an Unlecture science talk. A pregnant woman joined via video call, taking notes, raising her hand for questions. At Upstairs With Us, concerts routinely extend beyond two hours because audiences are genuinely engaged.

The Ivory Tower Learns to Descend

There's a deeper pattern at work here, one that Sukanya identifies when discussing her living room concerts: "These are things that we knew in earlier generations. And these are things that we've lost to time." She describes, as a trained classical musician herself, a world where musicians would gather in neighbours' homes, where family members made chai whilst others jammed, where a music teacher's visit meant the entire para would assemble to listen. "These were ordinary, normal, everyday things that people did."

The contemporary atomisation of cultural life isn't natural; it's structural. "The social modes and structures and the way that they have grown around us over the last few generations have resulted in us losing this aspect of community living," Sukanya observes. Post-pandemic, the hunger for these communities has become palpable. "People recognise what they are missing."

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What these initiatives reveal isn't that Indians are suddenly becoming more cultured. It's that the infrastructure of culture, the where and how of encountering art and ideas, has become inhospitable to all but the already initiated. The solution isn't populism or dilution. It's hospitality.

When Sukanya hands a towel to someone who arrived wet from the rain, when Damo ensures artists explain their compositions, when the Unlecture team creates space for extended Q&As, when Ayushi and Anmol's team works together to pull off a couple's proposal at one of their events, these aren't mere niceties. They're recognition that access operates on multiple registers simultaneously.

The living room, the coffee shop, the bar, these aren't degraded versions of the concert hall or lecture theatre. They're spaces where different forms of exchange become possible. Where the separation between performer and audience, expert and novice, becomes porous without dissolving entirely. Where, as Sukanya puts it, "classical music becomes normal in their lives."

The ivory tower isn't crumbling. It's learning, slowly and against considerable inertia, to come down to earth.