Indian American YouTuber Michelle Khare took on the internet’s toughest challenges. The Emmys noticed

By Saumyaa Vohra

My introduction to Michelle Khare is watching her being lowered into a glass tank full of water and locked up tight. In less than three minutes, she must pick the multiple locks that are chaining her limbs down. This ‘Houdini Trick’ she is attempting in front of a live studio audience ends in either success or death. I would say I am watching Khare with bated breath, but it seems insensitive compared to her current breathing situation.
The stopwatch reaches the 3.5-minute time limit, and the room goes silent. Khare’s eyes begin to bug out, her hands flailing as she reaches for the locks at the top of the tank to get out. When she finally busts out, you can see the air rush through her lungs just as it whooshes out of yours. She’s done it. Another challenge accepted—and completed.
“It might’ve been our most intense challenge ever,” Khare later tells me. “It was a gruelling 10-month endeavour for our team and we were very particular about every step of the process.” The 32-year-old spent months interviewing magicians, endurance artists and freedivers and worked with engineers to build the tank. “I trained for six weeks to learn to hold my breath and pick locks,” she says.
The process sounds arduous; high risk, high stress. But you soon realise that this combination is not alien to Khare. On her YouTube page, she attempts a wide range of similar undertakings under her Challenge Accepted series, from training for the Secret Service Academy and trying to deliver a baby to runway modelling and joining a travelling circus. Incidentally, this ‘range’ has been in this daredevil’s blood from the jump. “I’m the daughter of immigrants. My dad emigrated from India to the US and learnt a new language, a new culture. So growing up, I too gave everything my 110%.”
With 5.14 million YouTube subscribers watching as she attempts some of the world’s toughest stunts and professions, Khare has long been chasing another milestone: an Emmy nomination. A creator has so far never won a Primetime Emmy during the main televised screening—an oversight this adventurer is determined to change. Good things come to those who chase, and in May, after months of petitioning to be moved from the Emmys’ Daytime category, Challenge Accepted qualified for Primetime Emmy nominations.
Emmy dreams aside, Khare’s self-assignments are often so outlandish that you almost don’t consider what it must take to get permissions from organisations like the US military, NASA, F1, Disney and the FBI. “I write a lot of crazy emails,” she laughs. “As the show has grown, so has our legitimacy. Opening those doors now is smoother than it used to be.” When she wanted to do an episode at the FBI Academy nine months ago, she went to FBI.gov, called the number on the website was connected to ‘The Hollywood Guy’—a real person at the FBI responsible for ensuring that portrayals of the security service on screen are accurate. “He thankfully said, ‘What the heck, let’s try it.’”
Whether in Delhi or London, Karachi or New York, South Asian girls grow up being told to prioritise their safety over everything else, not draw too much attention to themselves or do anything that would bring shame to the extended family. Most of us are taught to protect ourselves first and dream later. Even among well-travelled, ambitious diaspora women, there’s often the fear of endangering the life our parents and grandparents worked so hard to give us, often surviving through war, partition, poverty, migration or toxic marriages they couldn’t leave. To many, it would seem that Khare is risking her life for views but she insists it’s “what will impact other young brown girls to go after their own goals.”
It’s not all glory and gumption though; there are human moments as well. Khare cites an incident from one of her Emmy submissions, I Trained Like a Black Belt for 90 Days, for which she practised under the tutelage of taekwondo legend Simon Rhee. “One day, in the middle of training, my period started. If you’re familiar with martial arts uniforms, they’re all white.” Her initial reaction was shame but her instructor simply said, ‘I’ll get you some pants from next door and we’ll keep training.’ “He didn’t baby me. He normalised it and focused on our goal. It was such a powerful reaction.” Come edits, Khare felt nervous about including the scene in the final cut but the men on her team were adamant she should. “It was a push-and-pull moment between host-me and producer-me. But I’m glad producer-me chose to include it. It’s the most replayed moment in the challenge.”
Khare’s next feat, out this summer, is Tom Cruise’s stunt from Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015), where he hangs off the side of a military plane as it takes off. “It was our biggest crew and some of the most riveting footage we’ve ever captured.” It feels like the bar has been raised but continuing to up the ante seems to be the Michelle Khare way. She brushes me off when I laud her bravery. “I’m not brave. I wasn’t confident about pursuing these challenges, I was incredibly afraid of them. I wrote out my fears on a whiteboard. ‘I’d love to be a runway model, but I’m not tall enough.’ ‘I’d love to be a firefighter, but I’m not brave enough.’ I have those fears, I just believe they’re conquerable.”

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