The pain was, he says, excruciating.
Mr Muralidhar has fully recovered but spoke out after seeing several stories involving people being burned in the hope of raising awareness of what burns sufferers go through.
A 22-year-old man is recovering in Hutt Hospital with serious burns to his face and shoulders after a water pump exploded on a Wairarapa property on Saturday, while a 41-year-old man is in a critical condition in Auckland's Middlemore Hospital after a fire in a Hastings public toilet yesterday.
Police say the Hastings fire appeared to have been deliberately lit, and the man was the only person involved.
Mr Muralidhar said the recovery for both men would be long, lonely and painful, and he urged their families and friends to support them.
"For years I suffered insomnia because I couldn't go to sleep because of the pain," he said.
"That's something nobody saw, nobody told me about. It's such a lonely journey. It's not talked about much.
"It would be very valuable if people understood that ... they can give you a shoulder or go 'hey buddy, I don't know what you're going through but I know that you're going through a lot'."
Mr Muralidhar said he had fully recovered from his burns and saw himself as fortunate, especially as his face was not affected.
In fact, his first words once the fire was out was "how's my face". His father had the same reaction.
"When your face is affected, in a way your identity has potential to be affected far more," Mr Muralidhar said.
"I can't even begin to imagine the kind of trauma - you have to really have a lot of courage and guts and self-validation to go 'okay, I don't look like I used to look any more'."
He also warned that actual burning was just the start of a painful process, with skin grafts being the part he struggled with most.
The area skin was excised from - the thighs, in his case - was left to grow back for 11 days before the patient was put into a bath of raw minerals and salt.
"Raw flesh comes into contact with all these minerals. For the first second it tingles, and then they take an earbud or a toothbrush, because they have to scrub the flesh clean," Mr Muralidhar said.
"I'd been through a lot until then and I've got a fairly decent attitude but that day, the pain was just off the charts."
The pain didn't finish there; damage to his nerves meant he would be superhuman and immune to pain one minute but the next feel like he had been hit by the Titanic when someone bumped him.
Compression garments - "sort of like a Batman outfit" were hot and sweaty and not really conducive to dating in summer.
"There's so many things like that ... that people don't realise."
Mr Muralidhar's recovery took about two years and he considers himself lucky to have no lasting effects, other than some scarring. He has lived in Japan and Malaysia and is now in Sydney, where he is a management consultant.
"I'm very fortunate. For me it's just a very cool story."
