You can love your country and criticize it, too

This Opinion columnist is proving that she is assimilating by writing about the good and sometimes not-so-good things about her new country. She is becoming a normal informed American. DP

By Saritha Prabhu of Clarksville, a Tennessean columnist

Why do you criticize your adopted country? Are you unhappy with everything here? Is your native country perfect? Isn't it hypocritical of you to criticize this country when your home country has flaws of its own? Isn't it ungrateful of you to criticize America when it has given you so much?

I've been getting these e-mail questions often (asked in varying degrees of annoyance) for several years now. I can understand where they are coming from; thoughts that would be barely palatable coming from a native-born writer can seem thoroughly impudent coming from a foreign-born one.

I also understand that the questions go with the uneasy territory of my being an immigrant and an opinion columnist, and would be glad to address them.

Why do I criticize this country? Well, the purview of an opinion columnist is to write critically about what she sees and hears around her.

It depends on what one thinks a columnist's job is. It isn't, in my opinion, to give readers a warm, fuzzy feeling (OK, maybe sometimes), but to mostly challenge them.

Some of my favorite columnists are those who don't engage in polemics for polemics' sake, but who sometimes take their readers outside their mental comfort zone.

Am I unhappy with everything here? No; far from it. But my happiness at living here is perhaps a nuanced one, coming from the realization that as Americans, our comfort, our safety and our high standard of living can sometimes come at an enormous price to the planet, the environment and to people living far and wide.

Is my native country perfect? No, else I wouldn't be here. Recently, after watching Slumdog Millionaire and reading the Booker-prize-winning The White Tiger, I was depressed because they both reminded me of a side of India that exists and is appalling.

The story of my native country is one of amazing progress and hope but also one of entrenched dysfunction and corruption. But The Tennessean, as most would agree, isn't the forum for writing about it.

In a way, my opinions have been a sign of my increasing assimilation.

And isn't that what Americans want from their immigrants? During the illegal-immigration debate, I recall many Americans saying, rightly, that they wanted immigrants to assimilate.
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