What happens when you bring two Urdu lovers together for an interview? It turns into a quasi mushaira.
 
Filmmaker Munzir Naqvi, 35, who has written the film Sehar, and Jameel Kamil, poet and former Urdu professor at Maharashtra College came together to discuss their love for the language, and its complicated status while drawing on their own experiences. Sehar, which releases next year, follows the travails of Mahendra Nath Kaul (Pankaj Kapur), an Urdu professor at a college in Lucknow, who, faced with diminishing enrolment and poor funding, is struggling to save his course from closure. The 97-minute feature film has been shot at Lucknow Christian College, Centennial College, Girdhari Singh Inter College and Old City locality. Kamil, who retired from Maharashtra College in 2013, has witnessed the academic trajectory of the language first hand. 

Edited excerpts from the interview.