In an interview last month, TV star Mindy Kaling confessed that she is “weirdly patriotic.”

“This is going to make me sound like I’m a thousand years old,” Kaling, who stars in Fox show The Mindy Project, told PBS’ Charlie Rose, “but this could only happen in America and I’m weirdly patriotic because my parents are immigrants and I feel so unbelievably lucky that it just came from grit.”

Kaling also celebrated her immigrant parents and talked about how they had been able to live out the American dream.

“I virtually never saw either of my parents growing up because of how hard they worked but I sort of applied that to entertainment and it worked out,” she remarked. “Which, to me, just makes me feel kind of good about the country in a way, because I couldn’t have done this in India, I don’t think.”