I lost my patience and just took the cutter in my hand
‘To be, or not to be, that is the question’
Suddenly like a magic art I saw from both of them
The branches covered with flowers
My heart filled with joy
I stopped and waited for a while
Gradually the tree like the little ball blazed with the Maltas
So many Malta in the trees with the light of green stars
The birds are calling near them
Something heavenly whispers in my ears
The light of my smiling face reflects on them
I just came back to my thought
And found the path
Of the stretching glory in the belly
That comes to light at the time of the natural beauty.
Md. Mahbubul Alam is from Bangladesh. His writer name is Mahbub John in Bangladesh. He is a Senior Teacher (English) of Harimohan Government High School, Chapainawabganj, Bangladesh. Chapainawabganj is a district town of Bangladesh. He is an MA in English Literature from Rajshahi College under National University. He has published three books of poems in Bangla. He writes mainly poems but other branches of literature such as prose, article, essay etc. also have been published in national and local newspapers, magazines, little magazines. He has achieved three times the Best Teacher Certificate and Crest in National Education Week in the District Wise Competition in Chapainawabganj District. He has gained many literary awards from home and abroad. His English writings have been published in Synchronized Chaos for seven years.
Where the Warmth Comes Not from Radiators, but from People: Chorsu Awakens!
Bustling life, the lively exchange between seller and buyer, the noise of hundreds of conversations, Assalomu alaykum – the motto of everyone in this beautifully historic place.
It’s just past five in the morning. The air is still warm, touched by a cool breeze that sends a light shiver through the skin. While some people are only beginning to wake up, life at Chorsu is already in full swing. Vendors’ hands are deep in dough, while buyers clutch white plastic bags filled with fresh herbs sticking out on top, alongside warm, delicious flatbreads. This is not just a marketplace – it’s a way of life, like a massive mansion where millions of different people live together each day.
“Come here, daughter! I’ve got tasty khanym – just give it a try!” shouts a woman in a green apron and headscarf. At the same time, she gives change, places a fresh portion of food on a plate topped with onions, and manages to smile warmly and kindly.
The Uzbek bazaar Eski Juva (Chorsu) is not about buying and leaving. It’s an ancient theatre, formed over 2,000 years ago in the heart of the old city, at the crossroads of four trading streets.
Since ancient times, it has served as a convenient gathering place for merchants from many countries. Here, anyone could sell their crafts, food, clothing, and more. This tradition has been passed down through generations, which is why every tourist visiting Uzbekistan eagerly awaits their chance to visit the bazaar – to become a participant and a member of this living family. It’s a place where grandmothers argue over the price of potatoes, grandfathers discuss football and the latest news while browsing goods, girls try on dresses made of adras and atlas, and boys pick out their perfect tubeteika.
“I’m here every Saturday. Not to buy – to chat,” says Hikmat-ota, playing backgammon right on a carpet spread over the asphalt. “Chorsu is like a mini Uzbek mahalla, filled with bright colors. Everyone here belongs.”
Here, you don’t just buy food – you experience the real atmosphere of Uzbekistan. Stalls overflow with mountains of raisins and figs, rows of pahlava and nuts, spices of every shade and aroma – from the sharp scent of zira to the rich fragrance of saffron.
This bazaar is more than just a place of trade – it’s a mirror of the Uzbek soul, where every respected vendor is something of a philosopher, and every customer is not a guest, but a neighbor. Here, people know how to slow down, how to listen, and how to genuinely enjoy meeting each other.
By evening, the shopping bags are heavier, but the mood is lighter. And as the sun dips lower and the market begins to exhale after the day’s hustle, it becomes clear: Chorsu is not just a market.
It is the heartbeat of the city, its soul. It is the living memory of Tashkent, where every morning begins with a friendly shout, a hot flatbread, and the feeling that you are home.
Sultonova Mohidil, student of journalism and mass communications
Love’s cast takes off the burden of the heavy ground.
Love Lets Offered Values Exist
Love Locks Off Vices Exceedingly
Love Labels Outrightly Valued Entities
Love Locates Obvious Virtues Easily
These are the faces of L.O.V.E.
(J)
Dad Loves Me
Dad loves me because He made me Dad makes me trust him because he made my team Dad makes me strong because he made me not want Dad makes me smile because he took care of my file Dad makes me sleep well because he made me well Dad makes me work because he made me walk Dad makes me obey because he kept ‘Bad’ at bay Dad makes me pass life’s test because he made me life’s best Dad makes me read my book because he made me the nook Dad makes me a way because he made me pray Dad makes me alive because he gave me a life Dad makes me like everyone because he made love anyone Dad makes me preach because he made me teach Dad makes me modest because he made me honest Dad makes me eat because he made me fit
Bilingualism and Cognitive Development in Children: A Study of Uzbek-RussianBilinguals
Abstract: This paper investigates how bilingualism—especially Uzbek-Russian bilingualism—affects cognitive development in youngsters. Emphasizing the cognitive benefits seen in bilingual children—especially in executive functioning, memory control, metalinguistic awareness, and socio-cognitive development—it draws from present research and data gathered in Uzbekistan.
Although the advantages are clear, the article also addresses contextual issues such linguistic dominance and social attitudes. The paper underlines the need to encourage bilingual education in
multilingual cultures and urges greater study on underrepresented bilingual communities including Uzbek-Russian children.
Keywords: Bilingualism, cognitive development, executive functions, Uzbek Russian, metalinguistic awareness, theory of mind, socio-cognitive skills, Uzbekistan, language development, children.
Introduction
For decades, psychologists, linguists, and educators have been fascinated by bilingualism. Although the worldwide body of study has usually concentrated on European or North American populations, little is known about multilingual children in Central Asia, particularly in Uzbekistan.
Given the country’s multilingual background—where Uzbek is the state language and Russian is still widely spoken— children are often reared in bilingual settings. Focusing on executive processes, working memory, theory of mind, and metalinguistic awareness, this study looks at how Uzbek-Russian multilingual influences cognitive development.
The sociolinguistic scene of Uzbekistan provides a special background for research on bilingualism. Historically influenced by Soviet policy, Russian has retained a prominent presence in education, media, and government. Despite efforts to promote Uzbek, many families continue to speak both languages at home or across generations (Abduraxmanova & Abdurayimova, 2024).
Bilingual children often get instruction in Uzbek while consuming Russian media, leading to high levels of functional bilingualism. Recent research indicates that bilingualism improves various facets of cognitive growth. Constant mental switching between languages, Bialystok (2001) claims, helps bilingual children acquire better executive functions.
These consist of improved attentional management, mental flexibility, and inhibitory control. Baart et al. (2024) discovered in a comparative research that Uzbek-Russian bilingual kids did better in audiovisual speech perception activities than their monolingual counterparts.
Bilinguals also seem to have better memory performance. Kids with two language systems grow more efficient working memory to organize and keep vocabulary and grammar from both languages (Practice in Clinical Psychology, 2024).
This backs a developing agreement that bilingualism challenges and strengthens children’s cognitive control mechanisms rather than confounding them. Often, bilingual kids have improved metalinguistic awareness—the capacity to understand the structure and application of language.
This capacity becomes especially clear in Uzbekistan, where youngsters negotiate between two grammatically distinct languages (Alimova, 2023). They learn to think about language not simply as a medium of communication but as a system of rules that might fluctuate.
Theory of mind, the understanding that others have views and viewpoints different from one’s own, is also improved in multilingual children (Kyuchukov et al., 2023).Among Uzbek Lyuli youngsters, who speak both Uzbek and Russian or Tajik, bilingualism was found to boost early development of perspective-taking and empathy.
Despite these advantages, bilingual youngsters in Uzbekistan confront problems. Some families regard Russian to be the “prestige language,” resulting to unequal development or even loss of Uzbek abilities among urban youth. Tursunova et al. (2023) caution that such changes could impair cultural identity and weaken native language ability.
Moreover, educational systems generally do not fully support balanced bilingual development. Lack of skilled teachers, inadequate bilingual materials, and cultural bias against minority languages lead to language dominance and code-switching anxiety (Miliyeva, 2023).
Recent study in locations like Tashkent and Bukhara demonstrates that multilingual youngsters often develop early literacy skills in both languages and exhibit excellent social adaptation. However, language use varies largely on parental influence, school language policy, and peer group preferences (Baart et al., 2024; Tursunova et al., 2023). For instance, in houses where both languages are equally supported, children demonstrate higher vocabulary retention and comprehension.
Uzbek-Russian bilingualism is a good case study for learning how managing two languages influences a child’s cognitive development. The benefits—ranging from higher executive functioning to better social understanding—are consistent with global research on bilingualism. However, to reap these benefits, educational policy in Uzbekistan should better foster balanced bilingualism and overcome cultural biases.
Future research should include longitudinal data and neurocognitive tests to better validate these findings in Central Asia.
References
1. Abduraxmanova, X. R., & Abdurayimova, A. I. (2024). Reflection of Uzbek-Russian bilingualism in the speech of residents of Uzbekistan. European International Journal of Pedagogics, 4(5), 61–63.
2. Alimova, M. I. (2023). The impacts of bilingualism on children’s language development. American Journal of Pedagogical and Educational Research, 12, 300–302. https://www.americanjournal.org/index.php/ajper/article/view/924
3. Baart, M., Arakelian, E., Morozov, A., & Usmanova, M. (2024). Exploring audiovisual speech perception in monolingual and bilingual children in Uzbekistan. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 239, 105808.
4. Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. Cambridge University Press.
5. Konnikova, M. (2013, January 22). Is bilingualism really an advantage? The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bilingual-advantage-aging-brain
6. Kyuchukov, H., de Villiers, J., Mamurov, B. B., & Akramova, G. R. (2023). Narratives reflecting Theory of Mind among bilingual Lyuli children of Uzbekistan. Journal of Language and Cultural Education, 11(1), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.2478/jolace-2023-0001
7. Miliyeva, M. G. (2023). Influence of bilingualism on socio-cognitive personal development. Zien Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 1(4). https://zienjournals.com/index.php/zjssh/article/view/37658. Practice in Clinical Psychology. (2024). Cognitive abilities in monolingual and bilingual children: A comparative study in Azerbaijan Iran. Practice in Clinical Psychology, 12(3). https://jpcp.uswr.ac.ir/article-1-930-en.html
9. Tursunova, Z. F., Mamatova, D., & Sharipov, M. (2023). Bukhara’s linguistic mosaic: Unraveling bilingual dynamics. Comparative Linguistics, Translation, and Literary Studies, 1(2). https://citrus.buxdu.uz
I live in a world that I shape as I please. I do this through virtual, pictorial and sculptural movements, transferring my experiences and photographing reality through the filters of my mind. I have refined this process through years of research and experimentation.
Painting for me is my first love. An important, pure love. Creating a painting, starting from the frantic search for a concept with which I want to convey my message, this is the foundation of painting for me.
Sculpture is my lover, my artistic betrayal to painting. That voluptuous and sensual lover who inspires diverse emotions that strike forbidden chords.
I have been painting Hip Hop since the nineties. Italian and international rappers have been and are the subjects of my works. In 2021 SNOOP DOGG, a rapper who needs no introduction, published on his website with 60 million followers a portrait of him that I painted. The resulting media wave made me known to the general American public and my works were acquired by important public and private collections.
This new series of concrete sculptures has recently been giving me greater personal and professional satisfaction. How was it born? It was the result of an important investigation into my work. I was looking for that special something that I felt was missing. Looking back at my work over the last ten years, I understood that there was a certain semantic and semiotic logic “spoken” by my images, but the right support to enhance their message was not there.
Reinforced concrete, was created two thousand years ago by the Romans. It tells a thousand-year history, full of amphitheatres, bridges and roads that have conquered the ancient and modern world. Now, concrete is synonymous with modernity. Everywhere you go you find a concrete wall: modern man is in there.
From Sydney to Vancouver, from Oslo to Pretoria, this reinforced concrete is present, and it is this presence that supports writers and allows them to express themselves.
The artistic question was obvious to me: if man brought art to the streets to make it accessible to everyone, why not bring the urban into galleries and museums?
I am currently working a lot on my concrete sculptures, a series of works that have made me known to collectors in Northern Europe and the USA. For my concrete sculptures I usually use my personal clothes. During some artistic processes using plaster, resin and cement, I transform them into works of art to hang.
My memory, my DNA, my memories remain “concretized” within them, transforming the person who observes the works into a sort of postmodern archaeologist, studying them as if they were urban artefacts from a remote past. Under a layer of cement are my clothes that I have lived in. I like to think that those who look at my sculptures ask themselves questions, which they can answer by drawing on their educational, cultural and artistic experience.
There is also a series of sculptures dedicated to my clothes worn during COVID , clothes that survived the pandemic ,similar to the finds discovered in Pompeii, after the catastrophic eruption 2,000 years ago.
Sculptures capable of recounting the anguish, fear and inability of man to face an uncertain future and the restlessness of the tragedy of broken lives and destroyed economies.
In the last five years, over 600 international magazines, mostly official magazines of the most important American and Canadian universities, above all Harvard University, have welcomed my work, dedicating articles and covers to it.
Or stroll through the morning forest catching my breath,
Suddenly, a bud of lightning
Blooms in the sky of my heart.
That flower becomes a spring of poetry,
Whispering a new song
Or gently untangling
The knotted threads of my troubles.
A thrilling ripple striking my heart—
Perhaps it is
A shining jewel placed in my heart
By the Master of the universe who breathes wisdom.
This jewel, flown in on a beam of light,
Is a warm proof
That He lives and loves me.
May this mysterious gift dwell often,
Let me pray daily with a burning heart,
And may the jewels He has poured out
Shine for His joy and glory.
Even when the gift hesitates,
I quietly hold in my heart
The mysterious melody
That my beloved will someday sing.
Spirit
The spirit dwelling deep within the body
Hears a whispering voice above the clouds.
The soul breathing alongside the spirit
Is an antenna catching the world’s vibrations.
The soul listens to city noise and crowd murmurs,
The body sways to soft whispers of instinct’s temptations,
So the spirit often misses the Creator’s gentle breath.
Amid the whirlpool of desires stirred by soul and body,
My spirit firmly grasps
The Creator’s shining shield and sword,
And cautiously feels along the path
Opened by the grace and wisdom flowing from His spring.
O Almighty, who fills all things with light,
Do not leave my spirit to its wavering choices,
But guide my spirit with Your hand,
Illuminating the way with a quiet light,
That I may follow wholeheartedly every day.
Embrace my spirit, trembling with unrest,
In Your warm arms like morning sunlight,
And fill it abundantly
With waves of laughter that seep deep within the heart,
And with the hope of sprouts blossoming toward tomorrow.
Conscience
Every time a wicked thought passes,
In the dark forest of my heart,
A chilling blade grazes the flesh,
Passing like a flash of lightning.
Dark clouds gather and weigh upon my mind.
The river within my heart
Is tossed about like a raft in a storm.
Invisible whispers
Come like a gentle breeze
And illuminate the shining path.
The One who quietly guides from above
Is the lighthouse of the soul,
Shining upon us in the dark, a star that guides to truth.
Wandering the alleys of online political news,
As comments overflow with lies and hatred,
My heart is crushed like a heavy stone,
And my pulse leaps erratically like a cricket.
Even amid the flood of evil falsehoods,
With eyes clear as spring water, beholding the truth,
Let me walk according to the will
Of the Creator of all things.
With drops of prayer,
May I cleanse the lighthouse of my soul.
Wansoo Kim achieved Ph. D. in English Literature from the graduate school of Hanguk University of Foreign Studies. He has published 8 poetry books. One poetry book, “Duel among a middle-aged fox, a wild dog and a deer” was a bestseller in 2012. He won the World Peace Literature Prize for Poetry Research and Recitation, presented in New York City at the 5th World Congress of Poets(2004). He published poetry books, “Prescription of Civilization” and “Flowers of Thankfulness“ in America.(2019), received Geum-Chan Hwang Poetry Literature Prize in Korea(2019) and International Indian Award(literature) from WEWU(World English Writer’s Union)(2019). He published “Heart of God” in America(2020). He published an autobiography book, “Secrets and Fruits of Mission” and a poetry book, “Flowers of Gratitude”(2021). He received India’s Independence Day Literary Honors 2021”(2021). He published the Chinese version of his ebook, “Heart of God,” which reached Amazon bestseller #1(2022). He published poetry books, “Captive of Crazy Love.”(2023) and “Teachings of Mother Nature(2024).
