Buddy The Elf & Crime Junkies.

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The telephone rang like an accusation.

Not a polite ring, not a missed-call courtesy, but a shrill, bell-ridden insistence, as if someone had wired December directly into the receiver. It was the kind of ringing that demanded to be answered immediately, without context, without caution. On National Crime Junkie Day, ignoring a ringing phone felt unpatriotic.

She picked it up with ceremonial urgency.

“What’s the colour you are wearing, by the way? Eddy the Elf here.”

The words arrived before sense did. That was the Buddy-the-Elf method: answer first, process later. Buddy the Elf—raised by elves, canonized by Christmas reruns, patron saint of unsolicited enthusiasm—believed that calls were meant to be answered, loudly and sincerely, even if the caller might be a threat, a stranger, or worse, a cultural contaminant.

On the other end of the line stood Kangana Ranaut, already braced for battle.

She did not ask who Eddy the Elf was. She did not need to. Culture, she believed, announced itself through tone alone. And this tone—this sugar-glazed American sincerity—reeked of soft power.

“First of all,” she declared to the room rather than the phone, “why are you calling me on National Crime Junkie Day? Is this a distraction tactic?”

The phone vibrated, delighted to be involved.

Today mattered. National Crime Junkie Day was not official, but neither were most of the crimes she catalogued daily, and that had never stopped her. The day demanded investigation, outrage, and above all, narrative clarity. Kangana Ranaut specialized in clarity the way myths do: sharp edges, single villains, chosen heroes.

She paced, already assembling the conspiracy.

Buddy the Elf—whoever he was—represented a dangerous precedent. A grown man raised by elves, promoting joy without accountability, sugar without audits. Hollywood nonsense. Imported innocence. The first crack in the civilizational wall. Culture corruption often began this way, she had warned before, with smiling intermediaries who convinced nations to stop asking difficult questions.

“Answer the call,” Buddy’s philosophy went. Kangana answered all calls, but only to interrogate them.

Outside, the city groaned under authentic problems. Smog pressed against windows like a living thing. Trains derailed in headlines. Young professionals refreshed job portals until their thumbs cramped. Rivers carried more chemistry than water. Schools overflowed, hospitals rationed, inflation climbed with the confidence of someone who knew no one would stop it.

Kangana absorbed it all and rearranged it.

None of this was accidental. None of it was incompetence. It was personal.

The Nepotism Gang had done this, she concluded, as she always did. A shadowy, well-fed syndicate of surnames and second chances, operating behind studios, universities, bureaucracies, and editorial desks. They sabotaged infrastructure to embarrass leadership. They amplified failure to weaken resolve. They polluted not just rivers, but reputations.

And at the center of their target list stood one man.

Narendra Modi.

To Kangana Ranaut, Modi was not merely a prime minister; he was a protagonist under siege. Every pothole was an attack on him personally. Every delayed train, a coded insult. Every graduate boarding a flight abroad was not chasing opportunity but fleeing a battlefield rigged by enemies who could not defeat him directly.

She cast herself accordingly.

If Modi was under attack, he required a defender unencumbered by committees, evidence, or moderation. Someone loud enough to drown nuance. Someone immune to irony. Someone who could turn every failure into proof of sabotage. She did not choose this role, she told herself. It chose her.

The phone crackled. Buddy the Elf—or Eddy, or whatever elf branding he was using now—attempted cheer again. He spoke of joy, of believing, of answering calls because the world might need you. Kangana heard infiltration.

“You are a culture corrupter,” she accused, pointing at the receiver as if it might flinch. “You distract citizens with childish optimism while real crimes happen. This is how empires fall—through musicals and maple syrup.”

Buddy the Elf, canonically, was a human raised by elves at the North Pole, a being of radical sincerity who believed that enthusiasm could solve structural problems. Kangana recognized the danger immediately. Optimism without suspicion was a gateway drug.

She doubled down.

She narrated the nation like a true-crime podcast recorded at triple speed. Fake medicines killing children were not regulatory failures but deliberate negligence enabled by elite silence. Cancer clusters were ignored because they occurred in districts without powerful last names. Media houses were not biased; they were bribed with proximity. Universities did not decay naturally; they were hollowed out to prevent inconvenient thinkers from emerging.

Everything curved back to the same conclusion: the Nepotism Gang feared Modi, and therefore sabotaged the nation to weaken him. Kangana, by extension, was not merely an actress or commentator. She was counterintelligence.

The elf on the line tried to interject something about singing. She overrode him.

On National Crime Junkie Day, one does not sing. One indicts.

She honored the Buddy-the-Elf principle in her own way: answer the call, but never surrender the narrative. She took his open-hearted absurdity and weaponized it. She believed loudly. She accused joyfully. She framed chaos as conspiracy and positioned herself as the only one brave—or self-possessed—enough to say it out loud.

By the time the call ended, the phone was warm, exhausted, complicit.

Outside, nothing had changed. The air was still thick. The trains still ran late. The young still planned exits. But a story had been told, and on days like this, stories counted as investigations.

Kangana Ranaut set the receiver down like evidence.

Somewhere, Buddy the Elf was still answering phones, still believing. Somewhere else, the Nepotism Gang grew more powerful with every explanation that required no proof. And on National Crime Junkie Day, the greatest crime remained unsolved: the seduction of certainty dressed as courage, ringing endlessly, begging to be answered.