With the sun softly setting behind her, leaves artfully scattered at her feet, Nikhita “Niki” Karra (12) strides purposefully down her street on a quiet fall afternoon, a walking contradiction to the slightly subdued atmosphere of her surroundings. Her voice carries over the otherwise silent neighborhood, and her arms wave emphatically, keeping up with the flurry of words leaving her mouth. From laughing over her early onslaught of ‘senioritis’ to ranting about a callous comment a classmate had made the previous week, the conversation is engaging, passionate and even a hint brazen.

Just like Niki.

“I can be extremely … I would say passionate, but my mom would probably say opinionated and not necessarily in a good way,” she said, acknowledging the mixed reactions she sometimes receives for her bold statements. “But I have super strong opinions about a lot of things. There’s a lot of really awful stuff in today’s world, and I will call it out.”

Whether it’s for an unintentional insult or an ignorant joke, Niki is known among her peers as someone who is unafraid to put others in uncomfortable situations in order to stand up for what is right. Friend Allison Jia (12) remembers how Niki once confronted another student who had made a disparaging comment about female athletes, and she expresses her admiration for her strength and fierceness in that situation.

“When I think of Niki, the first word that automatically pops out is loud. Niki has a voice that she won’t let anyone silence, and she’s not afraid to speak out if she thinks something is not right,” Allison said. “Before I met her, I was very much a quiet person. If I saw an injustice happening I would think, ‘I’ll let someone else handle it.’ But when it comes to Niki, she’ll always just use that loud voice of hers to make a difference.”

And these actions don’t stop at the classroom doors. Niki’s English teacher in junior year, Brigid Miller, reaffirms this sentiment, describing how “her hand was always in the air,” and she had so much to say about everything. When recalling how Niki once wrote and sang a poem with her friends for a class project, Miller easily conveys her admiration for her student.

“It was a moment that I would not soon forget, because it was so beautiful,” she said. “I could never do something like that. I always think, ‘as a high school student, could I stand up in front of a group and voluntarily sing an Emily Dickinson poem?’ No, never. That confidence and brilliance and passion and exuberance was super memorable.”

While Niki’s openness and honesty are qualities that are highly applauded by many around her, she admits that her tendency of speaking out with no filter has caused some friction, particularly with her family. Explaining how she once got into an argument with her grandfather after he questioned if she could cook but did not ask her male cousin the same question, Niki conveys her frustration over how confrontation seems to go against the traditional Indian values her family upholds. 

“I think respect is a really, really big deal in Indian households. And of course, I respect my grandpa and I respect my parents, but there are some things where I need you to know that you can’t say that and you can’t ask those kinds of things,” she said.

Niki finds these same restrictions in the Indian dance community. Having studied Kuchipudi, one of the major classical dances, for most of her childhood and eventually performing her Rangapravesam in August before her junior year, she valued the chance to experience her culture and participate in something that her own mother did as a teenager.

But Niki also acknowledges the pervasiveness of colorism in this culture, and how it has established an implicit beauty standard that young women are more attractive if they have paler skin. When she was asked to wear a lighter shade of makeup for her own Rangapravesam, she refused immediately and voiced her unfiltered disappointment and frustration that girls are expected to change their skin color and conform to this societal norm.

“I still like to dance, but I don’t love to dance as much given the practices that I saw. It was really jarring, and I don’t want to be a part of something that considers this a normal thing,” Niki said. “I see that my family is really connected to [our culture], and I [want] to show them that I can still be Indian without buying into the colorism.”

Niki’s sister, Namrata Karra (9), notes how she has literally shaken up family life in the last few years as she strives to challenge these expectations set against her.

“My sister is someone who changes the conversation,” Namrata said. “In our house, we never used to talk about [topics] like sex or rape. But she learns about them and reads about them in the news, and then she’ll talk about it to us. So it’s not normal [in our culture], but it’s normal in our house now.”

In fact, Niki’s impact stretches far beyond just her household — she has made a difference on her larger community as well.

From creating a website for neveragain.tech, an organization built to prevent future mass shootings using predictive analytics, to publishing articles for the group Writers for Social Change, she has been sharing her opinions, using that loud voice and not backing down from any opposition in her path.

Now fast forward three months after that peaceful October afternoon, when Niki was walking down the street by her house, and you will find her out walking in a very different location. On Jan. 18, she was right there in front of San Jose City Hall, marching alongside thousands of other protestors as she demanded equal rights for all at the fourth annual Women’s March.

And as much as she enjoys being able to go out on marches and rallies with her friends, Niki stresses that at the end of the day, she also just wants to incite more conversations and encourage others to speak out when faced with injustice.

“On a more relatable level, I’ll talk, and I feel like that’s the extent to which you can expect other people [to do] too. I’m not going to expect everybody to come to every march with me that I go to, but I can be like, ‘if you hear something that you don’t like, tell them in a respectful way that that’s not okay,’” she said.