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, powerful post-colonial actors like India, Indonesia, Egypt, etc sought to create a platform that would lend the newly independent states diplomatic leverage. In the decades that followed, apart from creating a powerful discourse in favour of decolonization of the remaining colonies of some of the rump European empires, and feeding into what became the Third World movement, Bandung delivered remarkably little. My paper examines the manner in which the ‘spirit of Bandung’ was progressively weakened by the dynamics of geo-politics of the Cold War world – mostly on account of failing to measure up to the aspirations of charting an independent course, sometimes on account of doing so quite successfully (viz. China) and sometimes because of failing on some occasions and succeeding on others (viz. India). The presentation means to explore the extent to which the Bandung spirit actually permeated into its principal actors. It raises the question whether the spirit of Bandung animated actors only when they were relatively weak in the arena of global politics, but lost its charm when actors were strong enough to dominate their weaker fellow-travellers from the Third World.