Indian laborers working in the Gulf are often the objects of technostate development projects. As laborers and migrants, they are managed and surveyed as they work to build and maintain the structures that are symbolic of modernity. From the perspective of Indian migrant laborers, they often see themselves as participating in these Gulf-based projects, but also as contributing to alternative modernization projects. During fieldwork in India and the United Arab Emirates, workers told me, with sincerity and excitement, that they were going to “make India modern.” This concept was difficult to precisely define, as some workers understood modernity to mean helping their families’ economic position. In that context, modernity meant clean water, a consistent supply of electricity, fast cars, and high-rise buildings. But “making India modern” also implied other, more difficult to articulate dreams; it was far away, hard to reach, and not fully known. In conversations, as I sought to understand what people meant by “making India modern,” I learnt that modernity was hierarchical and a process that involved several steps. For many, freedom was the central feature of modernity. This freedom was described as living in a city; doing what one wants; love matches, as opposed to arranged marriages; and having enough capital to buy the accoutrements seen on TV shows and on display in malls. It also involved “getting fat” and wearing shiny shirts and large watches. For many young Indian men facing limited opportunities in their home villages, migration to the Gulf offered opportunities to fulfill their dreams and “move forward and up” in what they saw as the graduated hierarchy of modernity. This paper shows how the Indian migrant workers with whom I worked shaped and re-evaluated their dreams of modernity while working in the Gulf. In particular, the paper focuses on how migrants’ dreams were impacted by their everyday interactions with governance practices and corporate management. This examination illuminates how technostate visions often rely upon relationships between corporations and the government and highlights the role of labor within this context. The paper concludes with a discussion of how migrant laborers’ own dreams of modernity can be understood to be in conversation with, but not necessarily subsumed by, technostate logics