Gender & Pronouns: Cisgender Male, He/him
Stance On Synthetics: Pro
Occupation: Talk Show Host
The Chakrabarti family is well-known among the upper echelons of Bay City, and their effects have trickled down throughout the generations. Money isn’t a consideration; it’s something that appears in bank accounts and is handled by teams of people somewhere else. The Chakrabarti fortune was made generations ago– some great-great grandparents building generational wealth into something truly spectacular. Jay’s grandfather was the first to break into the entertainment business, starring in beloved rom-coms that, although dated now, are still looked back on fondly, the sorts of movies that stream on nights in the park because they have such a general, milquetoast appeal. His parents were models in their younger days, and met in the fashion world. They now run their own fashion house, and are prominent sponsors of Jay’s show.
Jay is the only child of only children of only children of only children of… Now, the stereotypes about only children, of course, aren’t always accurate and it all depends on how you’re raised, but Jay has never had to share or go without attention in his life. He had the best of everything as a child. Private tutors, lessons in speech and singing and networking, all of the augmentations and treatments he needed to build the look that he has today. He’s still close to many of the friends that he had in school and as a young adult, but the way that he approaches them is a little different now.
When Jay was about twenty-three, almost fifteen years ago, he was fresh out of college, filled with the same new realizations of neoliberal guilt that a lot of people with a fresh Bachelor of Arts have been exposed to for the first time, and he decided that he had the resources to do something about it. Like many people of privilege, he was also woefully misguided about the sorts of things that are actually helpful. He went to his parents, saying that he was going to make a difference by showing that people were all the same, really, and having a talk show that would show a slice of life of all different sorts. His parents agreed to this, and The Jay Chakrabarti show launched its first season.
Over the next fifteen years, the tone of the show wouldn’t change on the surface. The first season is remembered as feeling extremely artificial, with careful interviews that were hand-picked by executive producers to be as fluff-driven as possible. A woman from the middle tiers who ran a shelter for dogs. A celebrity who had just started an organization giving schoolbooks to orphans. As Jay’s celebrity grew, and as he got more involved in the process, the sorts of interviews that he did changed. It was the fourth or fifth season that he started to have at least one or two of his interviewees be resistance associates or current and former gang members, obscured from the camera or quoted and represented by actors. The tone is still cultivated for the masses, with most of the episodes centered around celebrity news and media releases, but these “hard-hitting exposés” are what Jay spends ninety percent of the show prep working on.
In his personal life… well, things have been better. Jay is recently divorced, trying to work up the nerve to get back out there while knowing he’s far more in the public light than he was the last time he was in the dating pool. Even then, these sorts of things are hard to think about with the new attitudes he’s developing. The petty concerns that used to weigh him down don’t feel like anything anymore, not when every day he’s reading stories about the warfare going on in the streets and he’s meeting with people who have never had a roof over their head.
Positive Traits: Social, Empathetic, Confident
Negative Traits: Stubborn, Spoiled, Attention-seeking
Jay’s personality has metamorphosed a lot in the past few years, and some days it feels like a struggle to know what mask he has to wear in front of which person. He doesn’t want to let on exactly how far he’s radicalized, and he doesn’t know who he can be himself with. In his core, Jay is a deeply empathetic person. He feels deeply for the people whose stories he has the privilege of telling, and he wasn’t expecting his work to weigh so hard on him. He is the type of person who could talk to a brick wall for an hour, deeply extroverted and has a social acuity that maybe wasn’t always so sharply developed. He knows, now, when to keep his mouth shut.
In the past, Jay hasn’t always been quite as generous or understanding as he’s become. There’s still a side of him that gets pressed if he’s separated from his work, if the good things that he’s doing aren’t as attributed to him as they could be. He still has a habit of going to his father when he needs something he feels he can’t get himself.
Jay Chakrabarti ( Tan France ) is written by Shauna ( She | Her - EST )
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