While working on the mid-century design shows in India, after hearing that a cache of MoMA (Museum of Modern Art, New York) design objects of the late 1950s had ended up somewhere in Gujarat, I started my quest to trace the journey of these objects. It was on a sunny day in early April 2009 – around the end of Gujarat’s tantalizingly short spring – that I arrived at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. My friend Professor Ranjan ushered me to another part of the campus; after traversing a long pathway we fi nally arrived at the door of their storehouse. Through its glass wall, I could barely see the silhouette of a heap of piled objects inside the room. Humming to myself, I walked into the storeroom, which was located beneath the central cafe of the school. This was the tomb of the 400 objects that MoMA sent half a century ago to hail the greatest achievers of their time – Gropius, Le Corbusier, Jeanneret, Perriand, Nelson, Saarinen, Mies, Thonet, and Ray and Charles Eames (Figure 1). All of the objects were dusty and smeared with numerous fi ngerprints – a poignant satire on the belief that nothing truly modern grows old. I could hear the tumultuous sound of students in the cafe over my head: the objects appeared to me as if they were messengers from a bygone time, still heralding the un-kept promise of an industrial utopia, a vanished culture, one in which visions of and strategies for modernization – and its global and local variants – overlapped. I was fascinated after realizing that after all these years these objects were still performing in an exhibition in this Ahmedabad design school. They were being studied as case study objects in design studios and being exposed to the critical gaze of both students and teachers. In order to impart knowledge about structural integrity and construction methods, several times each year they are taken apart piece-bypiece and then re-assembled. I realized I had found a story to tell.