What was going on when I was born?

In thin-skinned craft, needle-narrow and minnow-quick, a gentlemanly assemblage of former oarsmen from the Oxford and Cambridge University crews took to the water yesterday as waves, not of the Thames but the Harlem River, slapped against the sides of their boats. Uncallused hands wrapped around sturdy oars. Wrenches tightened a bolt. And then the coxswain hollered: ''When you're ready - PADDLE!'' The Cambridge boat streaked from the pier, its eight men pulling at their long oars in an unhurried rhythm. It was the final day of practice for 18 former Blues before next Sunday's three-and-a-quarter-mile Oxford and Cambridge boat race down the East River, and it came in a warm, hazy sunlight that marked the first weekend in nine without rain.

The Reagan Administration has drafted rules that would reduce the value of a new Medicare benefit for the terminally ill to about 60 percent of the level envisioned by Congress. The rules set standards and establish the maximum Federal payment for a combination known as hospice care, medical, social and psychological services, available to elderly people with a life expectancy of six months or less. Hospice care emphasizes the alleviation of pain and suffering rather than the cure of illness. It permits patients to remain at home with family and friends, for as long as possible. Ninety-five percent of hospice patients have cancer. At present, there are 40,000 hospice patients, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates that 270,000 would be eligible for the new benefit each year.

Two months after securing a multibillion-dollar rescue package through international financing, Brazil, the world's largest debtor nation, is seeking to borrow more money. The country's spending in the first quarter of 1983 has grown far beyond the guidelines established with the International Monetary Fund, which sponsored the rescue package along with the United States Treasury and a consortium of European and American banks, and an I.M.F. official from Washington is in Brasilia, the capital, asking for explanations. ''The program really only got started in March, and the I.M.F. may have overlooked the fact that it takes time for exports and payments of this type to generate cash surpluses,'' said Antonio Gebauer, vice president of the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company and the principal American banking figure in the international operation of assistance to Brazil. Alarm on Public Deficit He added, however, that the country would have to get ''tougher'' with the giant state companies whose debts have swollen the public deficit to a point that has alarmed the I.M.F. Brazilian officials are telling their creditor banks that they require at least $1.5 billion to overcome cash-flow problems between now and June. More pessimistic estimates in the banking community put the country's needs at $3 billion to $4 billion.

They had come to Manhattan hoping to see the circus at Madison Square Garden Saturday afternoon, but there was no matinee. So Anita Karpowich, her sister, Margaret, and their three nephews and a niece visited the Empire State Building and then strolled about Manhattan. At 5:40 P.M., as they walked in front of Walden's, a clothing store near Herald Square, a car driven by a man who the police said was drunk, hurtled into the store's plate-glass display window. Anita Karpowich was killed. Her sister and three of the children were seriously injured. ''People who drive drunk should see the devastation they can bring to a family, my family,'' said Dr. Samuel Langer, Anita Karpowich's brother-in-law and the father of Matthew Langer, a 7-year-old whose feet were mutilated when he was dragged beneath the car. ''Maybe if they came up here and saw my son in such pain and screaming, then they would stop.''

An article Friday about Gov. John Y. Brown of Kentucky incorrectly identified the state's former Transportation Secretary. He is Frank Metts.

Governor Cuomo and Mayor Koch have agreed on a program that would require Medicaid recipients in East Harlem to receive all their health care from designated hospitals and physicians. Under the program, East Harlem patients would lose the option, granted under Medicaid, that allows them to be treated anywhere they want. The new program, which would be the first in the country to suspend this option, would require Federal approval. The state legislation proposed by the Governor and supported by the Mayor pertains only to East Harlem, but the program ultimately could be instituted throughout the state.

IT rained so much here yesterday morning that it was 5-2 against getting a car out of the stable gate at Churchill Downs. Several horsemen who bucked the odds were stranded in the windshield-deep lake that used to be Longwood Avenue. This was not just an ordinary downpour. It was an almost-Biblical deluge, the type that usually blows itself empty after 15 minutes or so. This one began at 5 A.M. and was going just as strong five hours later, making prisoners of everyone working in the stables. And because yesterday was the Sunday before the first Saturday in May, the prisoners included the trainers of the best 3-year-olds in the land, the thoroughbreds who will run in the 109th Kentucky Derby on Saturday. In a different year with a different generation of Derby horses, with perhaps one or two big horses and a dozen pretenders, it could have been a tense and miserable morning. Those who knew they had vastly superior horses would be getting edgy and impatient, waiting for the drama to play itself out. Others, knowing that they had only the slimmest of chances, would be wondering why they had bothered to come.

Cities and towns have historically sprung up and grown along major transportation routes such as rivers, railroads and highway interchanges. But the next ''crossroads'' could well be those places with access to modern electronic communications, according to urban development officials, planners and real estate developers. ''A city's telecommunications infrastructure will become as critical an influence in business location and expansion decisions as its roads and water treatment capacity have been in the past,'' three officials of the New York State Office of Development Planning predicted in an economic development journal. This growing perception has led urban officials to pay increasing attention to the telecommunications needs of their cities, raising questions about how much governments should be involved in providing a service that was formerly handled privately. Private developers are also starting to incorporate advanced telecommunications services and equipment, such as sophisticated telephone switchboards, satellite antennas and data transmission cables, into their buildings and office parks, just as they do electricity and air-conditioning.

Brazil, which owes an estimated $88 billion abroad, says it needs more aid despite its recent huge borrowings from international lending agencies, governments and private banks. Officials say they need more time for economic measures to work. (Page D1.)

Sex discrimination has long been a fundamental, and accepted, way for insurers to set rates. But proposed legislation would strike at the heart of the industry by eliminating different treatment for men and women in all kinds of insurance. What Congress is considering could cost the insurance industry and employers billions of dollars - and could also shift millions of dollars of premiums from one sex to the other. Although there is good chance of passage, a final vote is not expected until the Supreme Court rules on a related, but narrower matter.

The Nicaraguan Government, making what it said was its formal response to President Reagan's speech on Central America last week, provided today for the first time a detailed list of what it called violations of its territory by the United States during the past two years. The response, given in an angry address by Bayardo Arce, the political leader of the Sandinist National Directorate, was presented before members of the diplomatic corps and Government and union leaders. The United States Ambassador, Anthony Quainton, was present. Mr. Arce said the United States, as a result of Mr. Reagan's speech, had entered a new period of cold war. He said the speech showed that Mr. Reagan had revived the Truman Doctrine of Communist containment. And he called on Latin America to ''close ranks to confront it.''

There used to be a saying among Israeli foreign affairs experts, ''We don't know which Arab country will be the first to sign a peace treaty with us, but we know which will be the second: Lebanon.'' The saying was based on the belief that the pragmatic, businessminded Lebanese, who had no real territorial disputes with Israel, would be anxious to normalize relations with the Israelis as soon as some other Arab country did. In four months of negotiations the Israelis have come to learn just how wrong they were. Lebanon, according to Western diplomats and senior Lebanese officials, will not be the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel - it will more likely be the 22d.