The Afro-Asian Conference of 1955 held in Bandung, Indonesia, came to signify a desire (if not a determination) on the part of Asian and African countries to overcome the historical baggage of colonization, as also to steer clear of the new trajectories of extra-territorial domination generated by the emergent dynamics of the Cold War. Driven by the aspirations of charting an independent course towards economic modernization and state-sovereignty, India, Indonesia, Egypt, and other powerful post-colonial actors sought to create a platform that would lend the newly independent states diplomatic leverage. In the decades that followed, Bandung delivered remarkably little apart from creating a powerful discourse in favor of decolonizing the remaining colonies of some of the rump European empires and feeding into what would become the Third World movement. My paper examines the manner in which the “spirit of Bandung” was progressively weakened by the geopolitics of the Cold War world—mostly because of failing to chart an independent course, but sometimes because of doing so quite successfully (viz. China) and sometimes because of failing on some occasions and succeeding on others (viz. India). The presentation explores the extent to which the Bandung spirit actually permeated its principal actors. It asks whether the spirit of Bandung animated actors when they were relatively weak in the arena of global politics and lost its charm when actors were strong enough to dominate their weaker fellow-travelers from the Third World.