Nidhi Goyal is a fighter with a funny bone. As someone who has lived with a disability for over half her life, she uses her sense of humour and inventiveness to make space in the world for others like her. “After the first couple of years, when I acquired my disability, I think everything else became laughable,” Goyal said in an interview with the UN. “To do comedy, you need to be strong enough to point to that elephant in the room, which everyone is pretending is not there. And that’s something I’ve done since childhood.”

As a child, Goyal aspired to be a painter but at the age of 15, she started to lose her eyesight to a rare degenerative disorder. This didn’t stop her from dreaming; she merely adjusted her goal. Today she works as a disability rights advocate in collaboration with a number of organisations. And after hours, she moonlights as a stand-up comic.

It was upon the insistence of friend and fellow stand-up comic, Pramada Menon, that Goyal began to take comedy seriously. She soon realised that humour was a useful tool and comedy was a powerful platform to spread her awareness message far and wide. Popular stand-up comic Aditi Mittal introduced her to the world through the web-series Bad Girls. Since then, Goyal has been enthralling audiences with her unique perspective on relationships and sexuality within the disabled community, coupled with her razor-sharp wit. She is careful to not resort to lazy tropes and self-deprecating humour, and instead opens up conversations about topics that usually get swept under the rug.

In July this year, the 32-year-old Goyal founded the Rising Flame Foundation with the objective of building leadership skills and creating advocates within the disabled community. She’s also working on a research project on disability and gender violence with the New York-based NGO, Human Rights Watch and is part of a civil society advisory group to the UN Women initiative. When it comes to matters of inclusivity and equality, this comic is not kidding around.