Welcome to Pint of View, Bangalore’s first-ever community where classroom-styled lectures meet drinks in relaxed spaces.

Is taste really personal? Or has someone else been seasoning it all along?

From childhood meals and family recipes to restaurant menus, festival feasts, from everyday cravings, to the clothes we wear, the art we admire, the music we listen to, and the spaces we feel we belong in, what we call "taste" often feels deeply personal. But what if taste is less about individual preference and more about history? What if our ideas of what is "good," "bad," "beautiful," "refined," or "vulgar" have been shaped by caste, class, gender, labour, migration, and power long before we learned to name them?

This interdisciplinary lecture moves through sociology, history, art, theatre, memory, and everyday life to explore taste as a social and political phenomenon. Drawing on artworks, historical archives, personal narratives, food, popular culture, and ordinary objects, we will ask how taste is cultivated, inherited, performed, and policed. Who decides what counts as "good taste"? How do these judgments shape our identities, relationships, aspirations, and exclusions?

Facilitated by interdisciplinary theatre artist Sri Vamsi Matta, the session brings together artistic practice and critical inquiry, treating recipes as scores, objects as archives, and everyday habits as texts that reveal the invisible structures of society. Together, we will rethink taste not as an individual trait but as a living archive of memory, power, desire, and resistance and imagine what it might mean to cultivate taste differently.

We will try to question not just what you like, but how you came to like it.

About the Speaker

Sri Vamsi Matta (Vamsi) is a Bangalore-based interdisciplinary theatre artist whose work is rooted in lived experience, political memory, and anti-caste thought. Born into a Dalit community his practice engages with the everyday and structural violence of caste, positioning art as a space for refusal, repair, and collective imagination. Working across theatre, performance, writing, and participatory formats, his work brings together autobiography, community history, and radical pedagogy.

His recent works include Star in the Sky, that explores the emotional and political lives of Dalit students in Indian universities. Developed at Indian Ensemble’s Idea Development Lab, it was shortlisted for the Sultan Padamsee Playwriting Award and premiered in Bangalore in 2025. Come Eat With Me is a participatory performance examining caste through food and shared meals, performed nearly 50 times across India, the United States, and Australia.

Vamsi has facilitated workshops, lectures, and teaching engagements across diverse institutional contexts, bringing his practice into dialogue, engaging students and practitioners nationally & internationally. These include UW–Madison, Northwestern University, Melbourne Law School, University of Texas at Austin, Azim Premji University, and Mount Carmel College, among others.

Event Details

📅 Sunday, 16 August

🕛 6 PM – 8 PM

📍 The Bangalore Local, Koramangala [this is a sober venue]

Your ticket includes:

• 1 complimentary kombucha from Umami Brew

• First-come, first-served seating

About Pint of View

Pint of View is India's Largest Lecture Community. We brought the lecture in bar format to India and are now expanding across the globe with chapters in 14 cities worldwide. Here, big ideas meet intimate spaces, and you walk in curious and walk out with a sharper lens on the world.

Book now and develop your own pint of view. 🍻