On noodles, pasta, and ... சேவை

A couple of years ago, when visiting with the parents, father said he felt like eating சேவை.  I offered to help mother in the kitchen, recalling the hours that it took mother to prepare that.

"Oh, you can get instant சேவை from the store" father said.

I looked at mother.  "There is no way I will ever eat that" she declared.  "You can buy it yourself, and make it yourself" she added, as if she was disgusted with the very thought of having to handle that inferior product.

சேவை (Sevai,) as Wikipedia notes (is there anything at all that is not in Wikipedia?) "is a type of rice vermicelli popular in Southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu"  That Wiki entry describes the labor that went into making the traditional way, which is why I offered to help in the kitchen.  Especially when it came to that final step of squeezing the cooked rice dough, which if not carefully done can become rock hard, through the special apparatus in order to produce the fine strands of சேவை.

Ah, those were the days, my friend!

This photo from The Hindu shows how the சேவை is squeezed through

As real men (haha,) my brother and I did not sit down and turn the handle clockwise to squeeze the "sevai idli" through, but stood over it and muscled through as if it were a competition ;)

Wikipedia notes that sevai's sibling, the idiyappam, is an idea that is at least two thousand years old.
Did the idiyappam come first and then the sevai?  Or, the other way around?
Did the idea originate in the old Dravidian culture?  Did they get the idea from the Chinese?  Or, was it the Chinese who copied from the Dravidians?

We might never know.

I wonder whether "the Chinese-American writer and chef Jen Lin-Liu" knows about the sevai and the idiyappam, and, whether then her travels would have taken her all the way to southern India, in her explorations "On the Noodle Road: From Beijing to Rome, with Love and Pasta."  (Maybe I should track her down in cyberspace and contact her about this, eh!)  She notes that the famous Silk Road was not merely for commerce:

I definitely saw evidence that these foods had been passed across cultures in various regions. One vivid example of this was with hand-pulled noodles, called lamian. From my research and through my travels, I saw that the dish was really at its most refined in northwestern China and is said to have been invented by Muslim Chinese. But the dish could also be found farther west in Xinjiang and Central Asia, regions where it is called laghman. My research seemed to point to the Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic minority that live in China and Central Asia, as a group of people who brought the dish farther west, as they are often middlemen and travelers between the two regions.

Central Asia is still a long, long way from my part of the old world.  But, I am never one to dismiss the possibility of ideas diffusing through even back then.

Of course, this is not the first time I am exploring the Indian/Chinese connections, especially with respect to food; last summer, almost exactly a year ago, I noted in this post on a Narasimha temple at Quanzhou:

I suppose between this Chinese guy and a South Indian in Quanzhou, we somehow ended up with the சீனா சட்டி ("cheena chatti"--a wok); ah, recalling the taste of dosai made in that chatti makes me drool!
I wonder if the Quanzhou connection was also how came to enjoy the dish of சேவை (sevai)?  Hmmm ... More drool!

Seems to me that this issue has been "eating" me up for a while, and the news folks continue to "noodle" me about it.  Help!  Help me with some old-style சேவை ;)