Interactive tables at Drinx Exchange are your maître d', waiter and jukebox wrapped in one

"Hi, I am your table for today! You can call me table 1!" One of the many 32-inch LED screens fitted on medium-sized tables (that seat four) lights up inside Drinx Exchange at Saki Naka, Andheri. Located where the old Bar Stock Exchange (BSE) once stood, this recently-launched bar has seemingly ordinary furnishing – large ceiling fans, contemporary decor with booze bottles hanging about and pop culture acronyms plastered across walls – barring one thing: tables that talk.

Gone are the days where the only purpose for a table was to hold up objects. These have now transformed into something else entirely. "What does a bar comprise of? It has drinks, food, sports, music and the experience of meeting new people... I've taken all this and combined it into one product," begins Rahul Dhingra, 37-year-old tech enthusiast, who conceptualised the interactive tables. With a few outlets up and running at Mumbai, Pune, Bhopal and CBD Belapur, Dhingra along with his partner Dibyendu Bindal have planned a total of 20 across the country.

The talking tables have a content management system (CMS) that will soon become touch sensitive. The CMS manages a gamut of activities like introducing your waiter, taking food and drink orders, displaying lyrics of ongoing songs, an itemised bill and an option called 'crash the market', which is similar to BSE's formula of attracting more customers. In the blessed event of a market crash, for which a total of 86 per cent votes are needed, drink prices drop by 25 per cent. This is signaled by sirens and the tables give you a heads-up to tell you to, "keep your eyes open" for the one who crashes the market. The final voter's image is displayed on screens along with their name in bold lettering. It's a joyous occasion marked by bursts of (virtual) confetti. Customers then make a dash for the discounted drinks, their eyes fixed on the ticking countdown on big screens, as the crash only lasts up to five minutes. After the crash, no votes can be placed for an hour. "This helps me with two things," Dhingra says, "one, my price drop is limited and everyone ends up ordering quickly and two, if they're ordering quickly, they end up finishing quickly, making room for the next table."

However, to use the new age tables, customers are required to download the Drinx Exchange app that also tracks their location to make sure they aren't voting to crash the market from home. Logins can be done via Facebook or Google plus accounts that use photo identities to celebrate votes to crash the market and identify regular customers, whose orders are confirmed immediately instead of a waiter personally doing so. "We are not creating a hiccup in the conversation but just adding on to the experience," he asserts.

Dhingra, the brains behind BSE's stock market approach to drinks, explains why he came up with interactive tables, "It's been four years since BSE's concept launch. People have stopped playing with the app and are more focussed on pricing. I wanted people to create memories, talk to each other and drink up." But the futuristic tables are a costly affair. "We've spent a crore and a half to build the experience. Our budget goes up to half a million dollars, which we have to exhaust by March next year."

And since most bar experiences boil down to wine and dine, Drinx Exchange has snazzy cocktails like The Ultimate Bulldog – a blend of vodka, white rum, gin with juices and beer; Electric Iced Tea; and frozen watermelon Daiquiris to quench your thirst. But for this techy at heart, who says he's been programming since the age of 10, technology is everything. "Tech goes everywhere – at customer level, staff, managers, even food and beverages have to be designed based on tech. That's the future."