Brains Trust
Great Minds Build Bridges With Knowledge
Every year, the world loses irreplaceable institutional knowledge as the diplomats, military leaders, administrators, scientists, artists, and scholars who hold it move on. Brains Trust exists to capture that experience as it is told firsthand, and to turn it into knowledge that can be taught, debated, and applied.
Most history is written after the event. Brains Trust records the people who lived it while they explain not only what happened, but why decisions were made.
Brains Trust is a permanent archive of primary-source experience from people whose ideas, decisions, and achievements have shaped their fields and society, built to be used, taught, and published, not simply preserved.
The name draws on President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Brain Trust, formed in 1932 when he gathered a small circle of advisors to examine matters of state without bias or theatre. Brains Trust India applies the same idea to a broader set of questions: what a career spent in public service, defence, strategy, or scholarship actually teaches, told by the people who lived it.
The Archive
At the centre of Brains Trust is a growing library of long-form, on-camera conversations with some of the most distinguished administrators, diplomats, military leaders, business heads, and scholars of our time. Every conversation is recorded as a primary source, so that future generations can learn directly from those who shaped events, rather than only from those who later wrote about them. Brains Trust began in India, and its speakers today include voices from the United Kingdom and Bangladesh as well, with over 100 conversations recorded to date.
Vision to Victory
This is not a presentation about war. It is about how nations win. You hear the story through the actual photographs, footage and voices of the people who lived it. Victory came not by chance or rhetoric, but through clarity of vision, strategic patience, institutional coordination and exceptional leadership.
Built From Those Who Lived It.
Vision to Victory grew out of Brains Trust, The Peninsula Studios' archive of more than 150 recorded conversations with the veterans, diplomats and intelligence officers who lived 1971. Twenty-four of those conversations, alongside archival footage and tactical maps, form the foundation of this presentation.
Vision to Victory is a two-narrator audiovisual account, presented in a theatrical documentary format, of how a nation with almost nothing on paper — no spare resources and two superpowers already against it — won anyway. It is the story of leadership, strategy and the birth of a nation: Bangladesh, 1971.
How a Nation Won.
It was fought first by the Mukti Bahini and by the government sworn in at Mujibnagar under Tajuddin Ahmad, which ran its own radio station and functioned through the war out of a BSF facility in Calcutta while India's Intelligence Bureau, R&AW and Border Security Force built up and armed its guerrillas. It had faces: Major Zia ur Rahman, who broke from the Pakistan Army in Chittagong and later became President of Bangladesh; Major Ian Cardozo, who lost a leg to a mine at Sylhet and rose to Major General anyway; then-Major Shamsher "Shammi" Mehta, who took tanks across the Meghna by improvised ferry; and Lieutenant Arun Prakash, a Navy pilot flying Air Force sorties over West Pakistan who went on to lead the Indian Navy.
At Tangail, Tiger Siddiqui's Kaderia Bahini secured the ground days before 750 Indian paratroopers dropped in behind enemy lines — still counted among the largest airborne assaults since the Second World War. Political, military, diplomatic, intelligence and police effort converged on a nine-month timeline, with the US and China already aligned against India. It ended on 16 December 1971 with the Pakistani Army's surrender at Dhaka — just over 92,000 prisoners of war and civil internees, the largest military surrender since the Second World War.
The Peninsula Studios treats this chapter as a case study, not a commemoration: how institutions align and improvise when resources fall short of the mission. More than five decades on, that is still how government, defence, academia and industry use it — as material for teaching crisis leadership and cross-functional coordination.
Presented At.
India International Centre · National Defence College · LBSNAA · SVP National Police Academy · Army War College · Naval War College · United Service Institution of India · Rashtriya Raksha University · Western and Southern Naval Commands · Indian Naval Academy · Dibrugarh University · Bangalore International Centre.
Vision to Victory came first. It led Subroto Chattopadhyay to write Bangladesh: Humiliation, Carnage, Liberation, Chaos.
Vision to Victory is presented by Subroto Chattopadhyay, Chairman, and Maj. Gen. Anil P. Dere, Director & Chief Executive Officer, of The Peninsula Studios. Chattopadhyay spent three decades building brands at Brooke Bond, ITC and PepsiCo, and later served as Managing Director of HMV Saregama, before founding The Peninsula Studios with Sita Raina in 2009. Dere, then serving in uniform, joined later to complete the triad.
The session runs for 90 minutes, with options to extend it into seminar or leadership-lab formats. Universities, management schools and corporates can engage with Vision to Victory as a case study in leadership, strategy and coordinated action under pressure — no military background required. To discuss an institutional partnership or request the programme brochure, write to thepeninsulastudios@tps.ind.in or contact Narinder Tawakley at +91 9899004393 (WhatsApp available).
