Gender based seating arrangements in medical colleges-Is it required?

Dr Navbir Pasricha
Additional Professor,
Department of Anatomy
Dr Ram Manohar Lohia Institute of Medical Sciences, Lucknow, U.P.

My transition from an only girls’ convent school to a professional college in the early 90s was not much of a cultural shock. The decade-long absence of interaction with the opposite sex in school had now extended into college as we had separate dissection hall tables for both genders. In these circumstances, sitting as a mixed group in the college canteen was considered an absolute blasphemy. Given this atmosphere, it was an irrefutable, unquestionable rule that boys and girls would sit separately in the Lecture Theatre.