What was going on when I was born?

The Reagan Administration, seeking what it terms ''an active, positive human rights policy,'' issued its annual human rights report today. The document cited serious human rights violations in nations around the world, including some that are friendly to the United States. The 1,300-page report to Congress contains long descriptions of human rights violations in the Soviet Union and eastern-bloc nations as well as Middle East and Asian countries with strained ties to the United States. It also lists examples of torture, brutality and violence in South Africa, Pakistan and El Salvador, where the Administration has sought to improve relations.

DEEP golden yellow stars tinged with brown, rough green-skinned hearts pockmarked with hexagons and musty yellow ovoid shapes striped with purple. Among the monotonous array of their more common seasonal relatives - apples, bananas and oranges -these fruits may still seem strangely out of place, like bits of tropical exotica that conjure up visions of hot, sunny days and lush vegetation at a time when winter is at its most unpleasant. The eye of the curious shopper will be caught by any of these unfamiliar shapes at fruit stands, and every year there are more and more of them to see. What is a cherimoya, the hexagonally marked, heart-shaped fruit? Feeling it, smelling it, even shaking it will not yield a clue. The exterior offers no hint of the buttery white flesh and slippery black seeds inside.

Even before Governor Cuomo publicly announced the appointment of Roderick Chu as the state's new Commissioner of Taxation and Finance, Mr. Chu was deep in meetings with administration budget aides and tax agency officials in a quest for a few hundred million dollars. ''With a systems person in taxation, you can save a couple of hundred million dollars,'' Mr. Cuomo said bluntly. Indeed, it was as a ''systems person'' that Mr. Chu made his first mark on the State of New York. From December of 1980 until last April, Mr. Chu, as head of a team of consultants, charted the complex course of steering the state from its archaic and undisciplined method of accounting to a sounder footing known as Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.

Making money flying airplanes is not as easy as it once was, and an established but unprofitable American carrier, Trans World Airlines, may eventually be spun off by its corporate parent. Some Wall Street analysts and investors think the public offering of five million shares of T.W.A. announced Monday could be the first step by the Trans World Corporation to divest itself of the carrier. Not counting the airline, Trans World maintains a core of highly profitable companies assembled under a diversification strategy fashioned by L. Edwin Smart, the chairman, president and chief executive officer of Trans World. Today, these nonairline businesses account for all the corporation's profit and 35 percent of its total revenue. ''I think it's the initial step toward perhaps the eventual disposition of the airline,'' said Julius Maldutis, an airline analyst for Salomon Brothers. ''It affords top senior management of the parent total flexibility.'' At minimum, analysts say, the stock offering puts the parent company in a much better position to spin off the airline if it chooses in the future.

In its first major diversification move in nearly two decades, the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company announced yesterday that it had agreed to acquire the Celeron Corporation, a fast-growing natural gas company, in an exchange of stock valued at more than $740 million. Goodyear, the world's biggest tire maker, has been trying to reduce its dependence on the slow-growing tire market by entering businesses not linked to the automobile industry. The company, based in Akron, Ohio, derives more than 80 percent of its sales and earnings from automotive products. About a year ago it formed a group to seek diversification possibilities.

OF all the dismal conditions the human spirit is heir to, not one stands more in need of a party to perk it up than the mid-February blahs. The January thaw has come and gone, leaving behind only the grim expectation that spring may dally not just through March but into April as well. The Super Bowl is past; the doubtful blessing of spring football is yet to come. Worse yet, February's vaunted palliatives for the wintered-under spirit are hardly more than sops. The national holiday in honor of no President's recorded birthday usually finds the populace either bored at home or else broke, if not broken, taking the snow in Vermont. And Valentine's Day? Well, how can a kind word be said for a feast that features archly sentimental buttons, cards of questionable taste and cardboard hearts full of empty calories? No. Only a party stands a chance of success in lifting the blahs. That alone can provide both host and guest with a bright future to expect when all other futures have put everyone on hold. Nothing but a summons to dine conveys a vindicating rather than a condemning judgment.

SARAH was rushing to her seat at the ballet when she missed a step, lost her balance and turned her ankle. Within moments the pain was severe enough for her to abandon all thoughts of seeing the performance. The house physician sent her to the emergency room of a nearby hospital where a bad sprain was diagnosed. Three weeks later, her ankle is still painful and swollen, forcing her to walk with a cane. * Ed, a tennis buff who plays about four times a week, had never hurt himself on the court. But one day while carrying groceries from his car, he failed to step fully onto the curb and pulled the muscle in his calf. Ed hobbled about in mild discomfort for the rest of the day, but awoke the next morning in severe pain, barely able to walk. He spent the next two and a half weeks on crutches and it was six weeks before he could play tennis again. * Recently, I tripped while ice skating and wrenched my right arm trying to break my fall. Though I slept on a heating pad for days, the pain severely limited my arm motion and carrying ability for weeks. A month later, I still have trouble opening and closing car doors with my right arm.

The report of the Israeli commission of inquiry into the killings in the Palestinian camps in Beirut contains new details of the events of September and of the workings of the Christian Phalangists who carried out the operation. For the first time, the Israeli commission officially confirmed the name of the Phalangist officer in charge of the operation in the Sabra and Shatila camps - Elie Hobeika, the head of intelligence. The report also disclosed that the Israeli Chief of Staff, Lieut. Gen. Rafael Eytan, made a personal appeal to Phalangist commanders after the massacre to admit their guilt and try to explain their behavior publicly, but they did not do so. According to the report, when the Israeli Army entered West Beirut on Wednesday, Sept. 15, after the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel - the former commander of the Phalangist militia - General Eytan went to the Phalangist military headquarters. There, it said, he ''ordered the Phalangist commanders to effect a general mobilization of all their forces.''

The city and the state yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against the Federal Government charging that more than 5,200 mentally disabled New Yorkers had been illegally cut off from disability insurance benefits since 1980. The suit, which was also joined by six mentally disabled individuals, said restrictive standards imposed by the Social Security Administration resulted in the routine denial of benefits to severely mentally disabled people who had been improperly found to be employable. The eligibility guidelines, the suit charges, have resulted in substantially increased costs to the city and state, with thousands of these individuals ending up in public hospitals, shelters for the homeless and on welfare.

The general counsel to the Environmental Protection Agency was accused by a House subcommittee chairman today of violating the law by seeking to impede a Congressional investigation. The allegation by Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, arose one day after President Reagan dismissed Rita M. Lavelle, a top official of the agency, and after the House of Representatives held Anne M. Gorsuch, the agency's administrator, in contempt of Congress for failure to turn over information. In a letter to Mrs. Gorsuch, he said that his committee was being hampered in efforts to question agency employees to investigate strong evidence that waste site cleanup funds had been ''manipulated for political purposes.'' Representative Dingell is chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He charges that the environmental agency's general counsel, Robert M. Perry, sought to block the subcommittee's inquiry into how the agency handled the case of the Stringfellow Acid Pits in California. That case had been supervised by Miss Lavelle, who was dismissed Monday by Mr. Reagan as assistant administrator in charge of the toxic waste cleanup program.

Key White House and State Department officials privately expressed the hope today that the findings of the Israeli commission would lead to the departure of Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and new negotiating flexibility on the part of Prime Minister Menachem Begin. At a meeting in the White House Friday, top Middle East advisers told President Reagan that the commission's report could help break the deadlock over Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon if it placed responsibility principally on Mr. Sharon and only indirectly on Mr. Begin. The general view was that with Mr. Sharon in the Cabinet there was no chance of movement in either the Lebanese or West Bank talks but that, without him, the Begin Government would be somewhat weakened and Mr. Begin might be more amenable to compromise. Today, neither the White House nor the State Department would publicly comment in detail on the report. Alan Romberg, a State Department spokesman, said, however, ''We don't see why the impact of this report, whatever that may be, should affect the Lebanese negotiations or the current Habib mission.''

Congress should reduce future budget deficits by repealing or delaying various tax cuts due to take effect after 1983, Dan Rostenkowski, the chief Democratic tax writer in the House, said. He would forgo indexing of tax brackets for inflation and proposed cuts in estate, crude oil, tobacco and telephone taxes. He acknowledged that he could not muster support to repeal the 10 percent cut in income taxes due to take effect July 1. (Page A1.) A plan that would in effect freeze natural gas prices is being weighed by President Reagan, according to Administration sources. The freeze might last for a year or more. (D11.)