India, Feb. 5 -- You expect a lot of things when you enter a bar. Drinks with names you can't understand. Tipsy friends who are two shots away from deciding to start a podcast. Soggy fries. People seriously listening to a lecture on a weekend? Not so much. People holding a beer in one hand while raising the other to pose questions on Martian rovers, game theory and how plants and bugs talk to each other? Even less so.

The revenge of the nerds is upon us. City bars now host expert-led, visual-heavy chill lectures about subjects that would have otherwise remained inside college classrooms. And the very people who might have spent undergraduate life bunking lectures are now paying to attend them. The discussions cover science, history, poet...