Intense love stories are Mohit Suri’s comfort zone. From Awarapan to Aashiqui 2, the filmmaker’s bent towards the grimness and despair in romantic relationships has been clear. But Mohit seems to be making a deliberate shift now, as he reveals that his upcoming film, Half Girlfriend, is lighter in nature than his previous outings, and it has nothing to do with his view as a filmmaker but is a result of the changes that fatherhood has brought in his life. “Now, my wife has two children, that’s the change in our family post my daughter’s arrival,” Mohit begins on a lighter note, before adding how fatherhood now dictates his filmmaking process. “It has got me more driven to do a lot more things… It has also changed the kind of films (I make)… Maybe I am not making so dark films now. Like, Half Girlfriend is not such a dark film as Aashiqui 2. Somewhere, you also want to make your child laugh. A child’s laughter is the most addictive thing. You can’t get over it. That’s something growing in me now,” he said. Mohit has left the failure of the Emraan Hashmi-Vidya Balan starred Hamari Adhuri Kahani behind and is now counting days to the release of his upcoming film Half Girlfriend, which will arrive in theaters this May. The youthful love story is an adaptation of Chetan Bhagat’s novel by the same name. It stars Shraddha Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor in principal roles. “It is a story about a boy from a small town and has an inferiority complex. We have this hypocrisy that people, who converse in English are considered successful and those who talk in Hindi are seen as backward. This is very unfair to a country like this. So, how this boy with the limitation of language reaches New York in the search for his love and finally gets it, is what the film is about,” the director says.