What was going on when I was born?

PEOPLE who have been putting money into their homes for years can now get some of it out without having to sell, under the new ''home equity'' mortgages offered by several Westchester banks. Westchester is the testing ground for Citibank's new policy, and an officer at Westchester Federal Savings Bank said, ''The phone rings all day'' with inquiries since the bank began advertising the loans seven weeks ago. Chemical Bank has run an advertisement urging people to ''send your kid to college on the house,'' and a bank officer said the bank has had ''a very good response.'' The new loans, more commonly known as second mortgages, were not allowed to be made by banks until Federal laws changed in November and a new state regulation went into effect on March 1, under a state Omnibus Banking Law that was passed last November. Second mortgages used to have a stigma attached to them when borrowers got them from private loan companies or other non-banking sources, according to Esther O'Brien, assistant treasurer of the Westchester Federal Savings Bank, who said borrowing against one's home used to be ''the last straw.''

President Reagan has increased his workload to four or five hours a day and is essentially able to do the same amount of paperwork he did before he was shot in the chest March 30, White House officials say. But Mr. Reagan has only now begun to resume the one activity his aides said consumed most of his time before the assassination attempt: lobbying for his economic program. The President made his first telephone calls to Congressmen to push for the program yesterday afternoon. A week ago, when Mr. Reagan was released from George Washington University Hospital, his doctors said he would probably be well enough to return to his desk at the Oval Office Monday, but now Mr. Reagan's aides say the President has found that it is perfectly comfortable, and less of a bother than he originally thought, to receive visitors and hold meetings in the residential part of the White House, which is a few hundred feet away from the Oval Office.

Steve Comer, a 27-year-old right-hander whose pitching career last year was believed ended because of a chronic sore arm, weaved some unexpected magic for the Texas Rangers today. Appearing in the fifth inning shortly after a two-hour rain delay, Comer allowed only one scratch hit during his five-inning stint as the Rangers defeated the Yankees, 6-4. Comer's showing was unexpected particularly since he was the victim of Bobby Murcer's bases-loaded homer in the Yankees' home opener April 9. In that game he allowed five hits in one inning.

The Mets got their first look of the year at the Montreal Expos yesterday, and saw little to dispel the notion that the Expos could bring Canada its first baseball championship. On an afternoon spiced by disputed plays, the Expos scored three unearned runs in the first inning at Shea Stadium, and went on to defeat the Mets, 5-3. They did it with the same mixture of speed, hitting and pitching that carried them within one game of the Philadelphia Phillies in the National League East last year and within two games of the Pittsburgh Pirates the year before. The hitting was supplied by Gary Carter and Andre Dawson, who hit the team's first home runs of the season. But the main asset on this sunny and mild spring afternoon was the starting pitching, and that was supplied by Bill Gullickson, who struck out 10 Mets in eight innings.

YEARS ago, when County Attorney Samuel S. Yasgur was working for Frank Hogan, the legendary Manhattan District Attorney, he took a few days off and grew a beard. ''Not bad, but no trials,'' Mr. Hogan told the young lawyer. ''He was worried about the effect on juries,'' the County Attorney said the other day. ''I think he had a point.'' The 39-year-old Mr. Yasgur, a resident of Mamaroneck, runs his own office these days and, although nobody chides him for his beard, he is still conscious about his public image. In the midst of the continuing public controversy over the County Executive's suspension of Thomas J. Delaney as Commissioner/Sheriff of the Department of Public Safety Services, Mr. Yasgur has what many might regard as the unenviable task of giving legal advice to both the Democratic County Executive, Alfred B. DelBello, and the Republican-dominated Board of Legislators. The inherent conflict bubbled again this week as the Board voted to pay as much as $25,000 to help Mr. Delaney finance his legal defense, and Mr. DelBello asked Mr. Yasgur's office for a legal opinion on the issue.

MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN By Salman Rushdie. 446 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $13.95. THE literary map of India is about to be redrawn. The familiar outline -E.M. Forster's outline essentially -will always be there, because India will always offer the dualities essential for the Forsterian vision: the open sewer and the whispering glade, Mother Theresa and the Taj Mahal. Serious English-language novelists from India (often called Indo-Anglians), or those from abroad who use Indian material, have steered a steady course between these two vast, mutually obliterating realities; hence the vivid patches of local color provided by the timeless South India of R.K. Narayan's novels and the cool pastels added by the later fiction of Anita Desai. The Indian novels of Paul Scott and Ruth Jhabvala also fall comfortably between those two poles. For a long time it has seemed that novels from India write their own blurbs: poised, witty, delicate, sparkling. What this fiction has been missing is a different kind of ambition, something just a little coarse, a hunger to swallow India whole and spit it out. It needed a touch of Saul Bellow's Augie March brashness, Bombay rather than Chicago-born, and going at things in its own special Bombay way. Now, in ''Midnight's Children,'' Salman Rushdie has realized that ambition.

BLACKS constituted 12.6 percent of New Jersey's 7,360,000 residents in 1980, forming the largest racial group in Newark and seven other cities, according to newly released details from the 1980 census. The Census Bureau reported that persons of ''Spanish origin'' - Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Dominicans and others of Hispanic extraction - accounted for 6.7 percent of the state's population. The state figures were close to those for the nation, which were 11.7 percent for blacks and 6.4 percent for Hispanic peoples in a total population of 226.5 million. A third of New Jersey's 925,000 blacks were concentrated in Essex County. A further third were in Union, Hudson, Camden, Passaic and Mercer Counties.

HACKENSACK FOR the second time in a year, commuters have told NJ Transit officials what they think of a new round of proposed fare increases and service reductions for the state's troubled mass-transit system. ''The state should get out of the bus service and let the people run it,'' Alfred Marchesani testified at a public hearing here last week. Mr. Marchesani, who is disabled and relies on buses to get around, told NJ Transit officials that the vehicles were so dirty ''you don't know if you're riding on a bus or a dump truck.'' He was one of more than 150 angry and frustrated commuters who packed the chambers of the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders to denounce the proposed service reductions and 50 percent fare increases. They are scheduled to take effect June 27 on NJ Transit's subsidized bus lines and July 1 on the state's railroads.

IF the Reagan Administration's proposed cuts in the Federal nutrition assistance programs are approved as they stand now, most school districts throughout Nassau and Suffolk Counties will be forced to charge substantially higher prices for the midday meals they serve or will be asking district taxpayers to assume yet another financial responsiblity. Under the current nutrition assistance program, most public schools throughout the country keep the price of the hot lunch they serve in the 50-cent to 75-cent range by taking advantage of the Federal Government's help. Schools serving lunches that meet certain nutritional requirements receive financial aid to help them maintain those standards. In addition to that aid, the schools are reimbursed by the Government for the cost of feeding youngsters who qualify for either subsidized or free noontime meals. Students' eligibility for that aid is determined by their family size and income level.

HARTFORD BEGINNING tomorrow, 145,000 families and individuals who buy electricity and gas from Northeast Utilities but who fell far behind in their bills over the winter face loss of utility service. Thousands of customers of other utilities have faced the same threat since last Wednesday, when a winter moratorium on disconnections expired, according to utility officials. A less stringent moratorium in New York also expired on Wednesday, exposing a smaller number of consumers to the threat of shutoff, and in New Jersey, where a limited moratorium expired on March 23, thousands of shutoffs are now being processed. Utility officials said that because of higher electric and gas prices, combined with a cold winter, hundreds of thousands of customers have let their utility bills pile up. The problem is less severe in New York and New Jersey than in Connecticut, even though those states have more low-income people, apparently because the larger states have been more successful in helping eligible consumers get energy grants from social service agencies, well before the spring deadlines.

The musical at the Palace is ''Woman of the Year'' and it stars not only Lauren Bacall and Harry Guardino but also an irascible New York cat named Katz, an animated cartoon of a feline who whirls about on ingenious screens, sings, dances and talks to his creator. The lighthearted appearance of animation on a big Broadway stage with a big Broadway cast and sets that themselves move intricately in and out of view required heavy thinking on the part of those at the helm. This creative effort is in its own way a mating of technology and romance, of mathematics and rhythm. The six minutes of animation scattered throughout the show are depicted with more than 17,000 drawings and they represent only about half of what was originally done, what with the usual trimming and changes that are part and parcel of a Broadway musical. Michael Sporn, the 34-year old animator who put Katz into motion from the original rendering by the set designer Tony Walton, had only four people and three weeks to get ready for the show, as compared with the eight months and 75 hands usually needed to make a half-hour's worth of animation.

HARTFORD OUTSIDE the offices of the Republican leaders of the House of Representatives at the State Capitol is a chart that illustrates the political side of the General Assembly's scheduled debate this week on a new state budget. The chart, which looks like it should be part of a charity drive to record the upward march of contributions toward the goal, is labeled: ''Taxometer to Measure Democratic Spending Fever.'' By the end of last week, the red ink for new taxes and fees already passed by the legislature and the blue ink for other tax increases that have been proposed had risen past the $150 million mark. The chart's message is obviously political. The Republican minorities in the House and Senate are trying to pin the blame on the Democratic majorities for higher taxes and higher state spending in an effort to build a record for next year's gubernatorial and legislaive elections.