What was going on when I was born?

An international banking syndicate is seeking American bank participation in a $130 million loan to Nicaragua, according to bank officials and an official of the Government of Nicaragua. But the Nicaraguan official, visiting this country to drum up support for the loan, accused the Reagan Administration of putting pressure on leading banks not to provide financing for his country. Aid flows from the United States to Nicaragua have been suspended because Washington has charged that Managua's Marxist Government has been providing military aid to leftist guerrillas in El Salvador, a charge the Nicaraguans deny. The loan is being organized by a London-based consortium named Intermex. Its members include the Bank of America, the Deutsche Bank of West Germany, the Union Bank of Switzerland, the Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank of Tokyo and the Banco Nacional de Mexico.

The Senate majority leader said today that there was ''almost no support'' among Republicans for a resolution to censure rather than expel Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. The leader, Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee, said that a ''whip count'' of the 53 Republican Senators showed that Censure motion, page B2. the censure resolution was failing. The Senators, Mr. Baker said, were not polled on their feelings about expulsion.

On the morning of Feb. 9, the skies were clear and the weather balmy when a Japan Air Lines DC-8 plunged into Tokyo Bay 300 yards short of the Haneda Airport runway, killing 24 people. A few days afterward, Yasumoto Takagi, president of Japan Air Lines, embarked on a sojourn of obligation that in Japan is the expected behavior of a top executive whose company is involved in such a tragedy. Mr. Takagi visited the families of most of the crash victims, apologizing profusely and paying homage on his knees before the Buddhist funeral altars in the homes of the bereaved. The Government is still investigating the crash, but the circumstances could scarcely have been more unusual, and all the evidence so far points to pilot error.

Several interest groups for the elderly and others now say they might accept smaller Federal benefits than planned so long as the reductions were part of a broad effort to curb spending that shared the sacrifice fairly. This sentiment, in response to several Congressional proposals to freeze or cut certain benefit programs, is being reflected in the groups' internal discussions and has in some cases been conveyed to Congress and the Reagan Administration. It contrasts with the strong and widespread opposition last year to the President's idea of tightening the eligibility rules for Social Security. The programs are those under which people are entitled to benefits as long as they meet certain eligibility criteria. Such entitlements, sometimes referred to as uncontrollables or automatic spending, account for about half the Federal budget, with Social Security itself accounting for nearly half the entitlements and with Medicare, the Federal health program for the elderly, accounting for billions of dollars more.

An article in Business Day on Monday about romance publishers incorrectly identified the parent company of Avon Books. Avon is a division of the Hearst Corporation.

One of the members of the Nicaraguan junta said today that the military buildup here was ''exclusively defensive'' and that the United States was making charges to the contrary to justify a possible intervention. The Sandinist official, Sergio Ramirez Mercado, conceded in an interview that the country had expanded its armed forces and that garrisons were more scattered than when Nicaragua was ruled by Anastasio Somoza Debayle, but he disputed charges from Washington that 2,000 Cuban soldiers were at the side of the Nicaraguan troops. ''There is not a single foreign soldier in Nicaragua,'' he said. Seeking Nonaggression Pact ''When Mr. Haig is saying every day that they are going to bomb us and attack us and blockade us, how can they then turn around and ask us not to defend ourselves?'' he asked.

The Parks Department has decided against building a 150-seat restaurant at the Wollman Memorial Rink in Central Park, Commissioner Gordon J. Davis announced yesterday. Renovation of the Wollman building, which overlooks the skating rink, will proceed without the restaurant and on a more modest scale than previously planned. The revised renovation plan for the Wollman building will save the city $1 million to $1.3 million, Mr. Davis said. He estimated that the public cost of redoing the building, which will contain facilities for skaters and some sort of cafeteria or cafe in lieu of the more elaborate restaurant, will be around $3.5 million.

Forget about all those storied cultural differences between East and West, and consider Ah Pat and Ai Leen. The two Singapore ''lions,'' sporting shamrock insignias on their backs, will cavort up Fifth Avenue on St. Patrick's Day, alternating Chinese dances to the sound of gongs and drums with Irish reels. They will be accompanied by a marching band of young Christian, Buddhist, Moslem and Hindu students. The musicians and the lion dancers are all from St. Patrick's High School in Singapore, which is run by the Christian Brothers. Invited to join the march with Manhattan College, which is run by the same order, the students have combined their New York parade date with a three-week tour taking them also to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago.

Britain's Conservative Government today presented a budget for the next fiscal year that promised to achieve at last its goal of lowering taxes on industry and reducing the Government's need to borrow in order to cover its deficits. However, package provided for almost none of the new Government spending and other measures sought by opposition parties to stimulate the economy in the year beginning April 1. All told, the budget is modestly more generous than had been expected. But it represented no significant change in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's insistence that the economy must be kept under a tight rein.

World Airways asked the C.A.B. to regulate fares again because, it said, they are too low. The airline, whose early success was based on the cut-rate fares that followed deregulation, said that heavy operating losses and declining passenger traffic had produced a crisis in the industry that only the C.A.B. can resolve. (Page A1.) Armco is delaying indefinitely plans for a $671 million expansion in its operations that make pipe and tubing for the oil and gas industry. It had planned to add 450,000 tons of capacity. (D1.)

A late rally, led by some of the depressed blue-chip, technology and transportation issues, enabled the market to post a moderate gain yesterday in the fourth-heaviest trading in history. On Monday, prices fell sharply, with the Dow Jones industrial average closing below the 800 level for the first time in almost two years because of concern over the widening recession and large Federal budget deficits. The blue-chip barometer was almost unchanged yesterday until shortly before 3:30 P.M., when an avalanche of buy orders sent the Dow average up more than 10 points in a few minutes. At the close, the Dow was ahead 8.37 points, to 803.84.

Armco Inc. said yesterday that it had delayed indefinitely a $671 million expansion of its facilities to manufacture steel pipe and tubing for the oil and gas industry. This decision against adding 450,000 tons of new capacity ''until we are confident that economic conditions will warrant resumption'' is further evidence that the boom market for oil industry pipe and tubing, needed mostly for exploration, has slowed considerably in recent months as oil prices have fallen. Armco accounted for about 6 percent of the 4.2 million tons of steel pipe and tubing shipped by the domestic steel industry in 1981.