Maharashtra
"I’m blind, so is love. Get over it!”
Nidhi Goyal, 33, generally begins her comedy performance with this sentence to lighten the mood and do away with the doubts and prejudices of the audience. She is only too well aware of the discomfort of the audience upon seeing a blind performer at a comedy show. “There is an uneasy hush, a discomfort and murmur before I begin talking. People are not comfortable because they generally don’t know what to expect or how to react to persons with disabilities,” Nidhi says. She has been taking discomfort head-on for almost 18 years now.
The shock at 15
Born and brought up in Mumbai, Nidhi was diagnosed at the age of 15 with an incurable, irreversible eye disorder called retinitis pigmentosa as a consequence of which she lost her eye-sight a year later. “There is no cure,” she was told. That did not deter her, though. As a child and into her teens, Nidhi had always wanted to be a painter. However, when the dream crashed, the words of her family’s spiritual guru to count her blessings and try changing lives of the people like her, deeply influenced her. She completed her education and worked in media for a few years. But satisfaction eluded her and she decided to switch over to activism.
“After the first couple of years when I acquired my disability, I think everything else became laughable. To do comedy, you need to be strong enough to point to that elephant in the room which everyone pretends is not there. And that’s something I’ve done since childhood,” she said while explaining how she became the first Indian woman comedian with disability. Her first performance was in Kolkata in 2015 and since then she has done stand-up comedy in mainstream clubs, at conferences and for corporations.
“I would have loved to take up comedy as a fulltime career, but I don’t get time. I had decided long back that advocacy is my core. So, I conduct training, campaigns, advocacy with government, training women or people with disabilities, public engagement and conferences, research, and writing. It is a 360-degree approach towards advancement of sexual, reproductive, health and human rights of women with disability,” Nidhi says.
The flame of advocacy
It took years for Nidhi to groom herself as a disability and gender rights activist to help people like her who had to suffer rejection at the hands of society. She founded the NGO Rising Flame to work in areas of sexuality, gender, health and rights for women and girls with disabilities, apart from pursuing her career as India’s first female visually impaired stand-up comedian. The success showed when she was appointed to the UN Women Executive Director’s advisory group.
For about 10 years now, Nidhi has worked with a number of NGOs from grass roots to global level and developed deep insights into issues like disability rights etc. When she sensed gaps in the work being done by the various volunteer groups, she started off with her own NGO to bridge them.
Love bond counts
“In my first job with an NGO, I had worked on a case. A blind woman had adopted a baby and the case went to court. The court asked her how would she ever be able to find her baby if it got lost in the crowd. Even as the question hung in the air, the baby crawled to her and started tugging at her saree. The woman told the court that she would create such a bond that the baby will find her and she won’t have to go searching for the baby,” Nidhi says.
“In another case, a burn victim was advised to marry a blind person so that he won’t see her ugliness,” Nidhi says, laced with raw humour, which allows her audience to see the truth plainly and overcome a bias towards the disabled.