Almost as a daunting venture, I have successfully failed to comply with the title of the book in the first chapter itself. Instead of a ‘thought experiment in lonely solitude’, I did a ‘physical experiment with a friend of mine’ to investigate the above mentioned hypothesis. I have jeopardized the life of my friend and have been sued by his parents for ‘an academic attempt to end an innocent life’, but despite the odds have found a profound answer to the question of “Whether is it easy to Walk in rain?” The short answer is Boolean and is ‘NO’. The long answer is what the remaining of the chapter is about.
You see, I had already warned my friend that the experiment we are about to perform is dangerous, well I don’t remember whether I had exactly used the word ‘dangerous’, I may have used Interesting, but either way I wished to convey the same meaning. I am saying this to ensure that you too should not sue me for endangering my friend’s life. So the plan was to wait for the rain and when it does come, to walk in it. It did come, quite suddenly, exactly when I was about to go to college. So I had to cancel college. Also I had to kidnap my friend temporarily to make sure that he too misses college. After punching me twice symbolically for compelling him to miss college, and hugging me twice soulfully for compelling him to miss college, he gave in to the testing of the hypothesis.
So we chose a submerged plot of land, and while the heaven was pouring uncontrollably, we decided to walk on it. I sent my friend first, and my friend went first, quite proudly. I was beginning to write off the observation as ‘walking in rain is easy’, until my eyes caught onto a peculiar pattern. For every step that he took, my friend was diminishing in size! I initially blamed it on the visual perspective, knowing that things when faraway look smaller, but then I realized that the entire body of my friend was not diminishing in size uniformly. Though his height was reducing, his oversized head was still the same size! In fact, his hands, which were raised high up in the air, were being waved frantically which resonated alarmingly well with the “HELP ME!” shouts whose source, as one might unmistakably say, was his wide open mouth! It took me a few seconds to understand that my friend was gradually drowning. It took me a few more minutes to recollect that my friend had dropped out of the swimming course. And about ten minutes of careful observation and decision-making later, I really felt the need to go and help him. By then, only his longest hair protruded the water surface, which is odd considering the effects of surface tension of water-keratin interface. I being a master swimmer and winner of local swimming competitions, ran as fast as I could, with determination and dedication, in the opposite direction! It was really torturous and remorseful for me to observe my friend drown. In fact, the fear was so overwhelming that it washed away every single bit of helpfulness that had penetrated my mind.
That day, after dusk, I visited the same place again. The rain had stopped and the water had receded from the surroundings, but not from the spot, my friend had drowned. It was then, almost as a lightning, it struck me that the spot we had chosen to test a hypothesis on walking, was in fact the center of a small lake, or may be a periphery of a large lake, it depends on your perspective! People say, lightning doesn’t strike twice. Well it struck me! A hand possessing a familiar grip suddenly crushed my right shoulder. I turned around and faced a ghost. My friend, or his ghost, was staring me right into my eyeballs! But he looked older, way older. Then lightning struck for the third time and I realized it was his father! Who was angrier than when I had broken the windshield of their new sedan with a deuce ball. What happened next, I will prefer not to share, because I had once taken a vow that I will never let curse words contaminate my literary works. In short, I was taken to police station for an attempt to murder, unless my friend spoke up for me and said that it was he who had deliberately walked into the lake and that I was seemingly innocent. Though, he added the police can penalize me for compelling him to miss the day’s college and hence, miss out a lecture on topic of narcotic drugs, which he believed, was essential to his academic development. The police in turn, turned red with anger and sued my friend’s father for falsely seeing me with attempted murder, and gifted me with a big box of chocolates for being the victim of an attempted conspiracy! But who saved my friend after he drowned, is a mystery to me till date.
To conclude, the only thing I learnt is that you should never walk in the rain, even if it camouflages your tears. Hence, by the law of induction, we can prove that, walking in rain is NOT EASY!

Arkadeep Mukhopadhyay
Editor-in-chief
Antarctica Daily

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