Superstitions!!!

I was just reading through a thread in orkut where people were discussing on whether a woman should Vishnu Sahsranamam or not?? there was a few posts which condemned women folk from reciting VS. I feel its really absurd asking woman not to recite the stotram. Afterall it only has the 1008 names of Lord Vishnu. Will God punish woman just because she recited HIS names?? Strange. This is just one of the many superstitions that i have come across. People also say that woman should not chant Vedic Mantras..Infact, One of the mantra drishtas(author of hymns) has been a sage woman named Gargi, who questions Yajnavalkya in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. Its anyway true that this is mentioned in our Shastras that women should not recite vedas. But if one applies some commonsense he will get to know why this is said. Vedas are something which cannot be learned very easily. It needs a lot of time and in those days if people wanted to learn, they had to stay at gurukulam and learn for years. If both boys and girls started learning vedas, who will take care of the household?? now some feminist might ask why men cant do that. ok, even if we take that men does the household chores and let women chant vedas..but still women has to give birth to child, a duty which cannot be passed on to men(fortunately or unfortunately )..During that period and after child birth will she keep chanting vedas or will she take care of the child??? The people during vedic age had really good intention in mind, when they asked women not to chant vedas...But the views were completed distorted(I think this was again a handiwork of british and so called orientlist)to show that there was a discrimination against women!!!

Before concluding i just want to say one thing. Dont believe blindly on traditions. Apply some logic and think the reason why somethings were done in a different way!!!!

Existence of Demigods

Chapter 7 -23

Lord Krishna:"Limited is the fruit gained by these men of small understanding who worship the other gods. At the most they go to them(the gods). But only My devotee comes to ME"

Since Lord Krishna is the supreme reality we can conclude a few things
1. Existence of Demigods is accepted ( By demigods i mean only agni, vayu, varuna, indra, Siva, brahma..not necesarliy in that order..any discussion about the so called demigods like kalki and amma amrita are pointless and not worth discussing)

2. Gaining of fruits, though limted, from these lesser Gods is also confirmed from this verse.

3. The last sentence is also very important. "Only My devotee comes to ME"... here "My devotee" should not be considered as one who just worships Him but one for whom there is nothing except Lord Narayana. This has been reiterated again and again by our AchAryas also. A better example would be of Gajendravaradhan, Where Lord Narayana Saves the elephant only after it abandons everything and asks for saranagathi!!!!

I hope everyone accepts the presence of Demigods, since it has been confirmed by Lord Krishna Himself in Gita. I want to ask a question now!! If the existence of Demigods are accepted, then what was the purpose of their Creation????? When we have some duties to be performed{varnashrama dharma}, similarly they also have some duties to performed right??? In that surely one of their duties is granting boons to us. If Brahma had not given boon to Hiranyakashipu there was no purpose for Lord Narayana to take the avatar of Narasimha...When Lord NArAyana has given that power to demigods of granting boons, then he would also have given conditions on when to give boons..right?? that would be only when we worship those specific demigods!!!

So its very clear that we can and we have to worship demigods if we need to attain some fruits..but there is certain limitation here. For saranagathi can only be given by Lord Narayana and no one else!!!!

If people are hell bent on not worshipping demigods then they have to stop doing all brahminical rituals since we worship agni, vayu,surya, varuna, vishwaksenar et al in that!!! And they also have to explain why they have temples for our PurvAchAryas who are also considered as demigods!!!