The Hindu Business Line : Go where there is no path and leave a trail

THE recent Budget speech of the Finance Minister, Mr P. Chidambaram, spoke not only of a transparent trail in the trading of financial derivatives that he was happy about, but also complained of large cash withdrawals from banks leaving no trail. If you were on the Minister's trail, tracking his post-Budget interviews, you'd have by now come to terms with his obsession over trail. But what's a trail?

`Trail', as the Concise Oxford English Dictionary explains, is "a mark or a series of signs or objects left behind by the passage of someone or something." It is a track or scent that comes in handy if you're trying to follow or hunt someone. As the day's story on www.heraldsun.news.com.au reads: "A winding trail of red paint drips has helped police track down a man suspected of stealing a construction worker's car and trailer." As he sped with the trailer, paint dripped slowly and what the cops had to do was to "join the dots" after the suspect "painted himself into a corner".

Trails are the leads that open up as beaten paths for investigators. Thus, in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, when Dolabella cries: "Here, on her breast, There is a vent of blood and something blown: The like is on her arm," pointing to the dead Cleopatra, the First Guard reads the clues: "This is an aspic's trail: and these fig-leaves have slime upon them, such as the aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile."

Etymology, as trailed in Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, traces the word to "Middle French trailer, to tow, from (assumed) Vulgar Latin tragulare, from Latin tragula sledge, dragnet; akin to Latin trahere to pull."

Online Etymology Dictionary shows how the same root, trahere, can be found in traction, trace, distract (draw away), extract (draw out), abstract, contract (com [together] + trahere), detraction, protract, retreat (re [back] + trahere), subtraction, attract, tractor, trait, trace, train, drag, and treat.

Trail means falling behind in athletic competition, as Rabri's tally was at one time during counting after the recent elections in Bihar. Advertising on trailer is also called trail; so, one may expect the I-T Department to adopt such a method for herding people into trail thinking. Voice can be trailing, that is fading gradually before stopping, not only when life ebbs away but also when your mobile is on low charge or signal weakens.

Trail can be "any linear route for travel," says Wikipedia. A link from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail takes me to a "list of long-distance footpaths", making one fondly wish for such trails in our countryside too. To encourage, here is Rudyard Kipling calling: "And it's time to turn on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail, pull out, pull out, on the Long Trail - the trail that is always new." For, there's fun walking in and `out of the woods' even if you be "worn out upon the trail," as Robert Frost wrote.

A plant `trailing' grows along the ground, hanging down. "Paused to rest beneath a pine-tree, from whose branches trailed the mosses," writes Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Song of Hiawatha. The same poem also talks of war-parties which, when retreating, "Burn the prairies on their war-trail."

William Wordsworth's lines on nature include, "Tough moss, and long-enduring mountain plants, that creep along the ground with sinuous trail, were nicely braided." Dresses can be trailing too, that is, drawn along behind, as you'd know in a poem by T.S. Eliot: "After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor."

Of pennants trailing and street-festoons hanging from the windows, one can read in Walt Whitman's `Leaves of Grass'. On Mark Olsen's ARTFL Project site http://machaut.uchicago.edu, you can spot Dryden ("And hung his head, and trailed his legs along"), Milton ("They shall not trail me through their streets Like a wild beast") and Pope ("Long behind he trails his pompous robe"). However, what Achilles says in Troilus and Cressida can make you flinch: "Come, tie his body to my horse's tail; along the field I will the Trojan trail."

Audit trail is what we can't ignore while we're on the trail of the word. Audit trail (often written wrongly as trial since accountants worry more about trial balance) is relevant in computerised environments too. For such contexts, Webopedia defines the phrase as: "A record showing who has accessed a computer system and what operations he or she has performed during a given period of time. Audit trails are useful both for maintaining security and for recovering lost transactions." A day after the Budget, when a TV host asked the FM how he can create an audit trail with a tax of Rs 10 on withdrawal of Rs 10,000, the Minister shot back that the transaction will be subject to tax and so it will leave a tax trail, before he launched into what has now become a tiring tirade: "You don't know how it happens. You don't have as much information as I have... You wait and see until the rules are made."

I'm sure the host would have concurred with Queen Gertrude's exclamation in Hamlet: "How cheerfully on the false trail they cry!" Meanwhile, there's support for Mr Chidambaram from Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

ComingToTerms@TheHindu.co.in

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