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
Vision to Victory is a definitive audiovisual account of leadership, strategy, and the birth of a nation — Bangladesh, in 1971.
The 1971 campaign brought political objectives, military action, diplomacy, intelligence, and police work into coordinated alignment to create the new nation of Bangladesh. The Peninsula Studios presents this chapter not as a history lesson, but as an examination of how government, military, intelligence, and diplomatic institutions acted together under pressure. Built on 26 hours of primary-source recordings across 24 conversations with war veterans, diplomats, and intelligence professionals, alongside archival footage and tactical maps. For institutions in government, defence, academia, and industry, the 1971 campaign offers a case study in coordinated action and decision-making under extreme pressure — material suited to case-based teaching in crisis leadership, strategic decision-making, and cross-functional coordination.
We have shared this presentation with the National Defence College, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA), Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel National Police Academy, Army War College, Indian Naval Academy, Western and Southern Naval Commands, United Service Institution of India, and India International Centre.
For these institutions, the session serves as analysis rather than commemoration. More than five decades since the Liberation, the 1971 campaign continues to inform how institutions think about policy and management under pressure. The same research also produced the book Bangladesh: Humiliation, Carnage, Liberation, Chaos, authored by Subroto Chattopadhyay.
The presentation is delivered by Subroto Chattopadhyay, Chairman, and Maj. Gen. Anil P. Dere (Retd.), Director & Chief Executive Officer, both 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 co-founding The Peninsula Studios.
The session runs as a 90-minute presentation, with options to extend into seminar or leadership-lab formats, tailored to an institution's time and learning objectives. We invite universities, management schools, and corporates to engage with this presentation. To discuss an institutional partnership or request the Vision to Victory programme brochure, write to us at thepeninsulastudios@tps.ind.in or contact Narinder Tawakley at +91 9899004393 (WhatsApp available).
