Ramzan 2016 is over, and so are the days when everybody attempted to transform into the best possible version of themselves.

The commercials showing close-knit families praying and celebrating the holy month together presented a believable, albeit glamourised picture of life in Pakistan. To a child, Ramzan was almost surreal, bringing with it an abundance of goodwill and tolerance.

Ramzan 2016 was surreal too, but for revealing what the lure of money and power can make people do. Alice would be far more bewildered by the ‘special’ Ramzan shows on Pakistani channels than by her Wonderland.

A popular Islamic scholar-turned-talk-show-host-turned-fashion-designer asks his studio audience to contort their faces on one TV channel while another offers rishta and shaadi advice as morning shows go on a spree of tasteless glitz frenzy to increase their ratings.

In other news, a maulana with a huge following declares it permissible to kill an actor for daring to start a discussion on the plight of the Ahmediyya community in Pakistan. The proposed show is effectively scraped while the maulana struts around self-righteously. Artists and activists are warned about the inability of the State to provide security against enraged religious zealots.

After all, what does security in Pakistan mean anymore? It means, dear friends, armed guards and black tinted windows and security firms who charge suitcases full of money in exchange for their services. For the rest of the country’s minions, security is reduced to a state of mind.

Within the premises of a ‘secure,’ gated residential community, peeping Toms videotape and blackmail a girl standing in her room. A qawwal of Amjad Sabri’s calibre is murdered in broad daylight on the roads of Karachi. His crime? For singing lines that was recently declared by some maulvis to cross the line of ‘bidat’.

It is not the lyrics that have altered over the past few decades. It is the threshold of tolerance that has nose-dived.

How sad that upon hearing of the latest terror attack anywhere in the world, our reaction is to hope, firstly, that the attackers not be Muslims, and secondly, that they are not of Pakistani descent!

How shameful that while the Palestinians struggle to find drinking water in this heat due to deliberate Israeli water obstruction, women in our country threaten salesmen with dire consequences for failing to find the correct size in a kurta of their choice!

How strange that as families in Turkey mourn the death of innocent travellers blown up by suicide bombers, people in Pakistan fight over who gets the best table at restaurants for sehri and iftar parties!

How pathetic that an ambulance driver has to frantically try to find way through traffic clogged by men in big cars who slow their vehicles to a crawl simply to stare at women shopping in the glass-windowed stores along Lahore’s popular MM Alam Road!

Around the globe, people prove that the vilest evil lies within Man himself. Shakespeare said, "What’s in a name?" The world today seems to shrug and say, "What’s in a human life?"

Every day, thousands of Syrians bemoan their helplessness as they watch their homes and futures ravaged by the worst war in modern history. To quote the songwriter Warsan Shire, "No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land."

Yet, nobody mourns.

Forget about whether the rest of the world is doing enough for the Muslim refugees. Ask instead, what is the Muslim community doing for itself?

Yes, Alice would have been bewildered by us all.