The trailer plays like light entertainment. A father with fixation amnesia stumbles through conversations. A daughter with night blindness tries to navigate everyday moments. Other family members appear with hearing loss or stammering speech. Each characteristic becomes the centre of a punchline.

Many people watched the trailer of Aankh Micholi and let the jokes pass. Nipun Malhotra did not. The laughter hit him in a way that felt familiar and tiring. It reduced disability to a spectacle. It ignored the lives behind such conditions and turned difference into an easy prop.

Nipun had seen this pattern repeat for years. Disabled characters often appeared on screen as burdens, as heroic exceptions, or as comic relief. This time, he felt something shift inside him. He chose to challenge it.

In July 2024, the Supreme Court of India gave its verdict on his petition. What began as a response to one film grew into a judgment that now guides how disability is portrayed across the country.

The Court introduced a distinction that had never been articulated so clearly in Indian law. It separated humour that includes disability and treats it sensitively from humour that mocks or reduces a person’s identity to their condition. This second category, which the Court called ‘disabling humour’, was found to harm dignity and reinforce prejudice.

For Nipun, this clarity held power. “The important part of the legal outcome was that now there was a distinction,” he tells The Better India. “And that is something which will make people aware that they cannot get........

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