What was going on when I was born?

''Every day I go out in the field. And I say, 'What am I doing here? I've got all these debts and I'm up against all these big companies.'

Religious groups and preservationists, who have clashed for years over giving landmark status to houses of worship in Manhattan, have taken their battle to Albany for the first time. At issue is a proposal by the city's religious establishment to exempt houses of worship across the state from local preservation laws. The measure was introduced in the Senate and Assembly two weeks ago. Mayor Koch, the Municipal Arts Society and the New York Conservancy oppose the measure, and prominent preservationists, including Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, have written and telephoned legislators to denounce it as a threat to the city's architectural treasures.

Key House Democrats, including some liberals on the Ways and Means Committee, said today that they were opposed to a proposal by Speaker Thomas P. O'Neill Jr. to limit personal income tax reductions this year to $700. Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, has opposed the limit as a bad political maneuver. He said it could be difficult to pass the bill on the floor of the House of Representatives if the committee's Democrats are divided. Mr. O'Neill proposed in a speech last week that, when income tax rates are reduced July 1 by 10 percent, the tax savings be limited to $700 a filer for the calendar year 1983. The reduction in rates is the third and final step in President Reagan's program of lowering income taxes.

From a slender minaret of the Id Kah Mosque, a loudspeaker summoned the faithful to evening prayer. A street vendor removed his cloth shoes, knelt on a piece of cardboard under a poplar tree and pressed his forehead to the ground in the southwestward direction of Mecca. Inside the rambling mosque in this heavily Moslem city in western China, a row of other worshipers facing the whitewashed wall took up the affirmation of God's greatness - ''Allah akhbar!'' Daily prayer, one of the five pillars of the Moslem faith, goes on today in the world's most populous atheistic country. After harsh but ultimately unsuccessful persecution by Maoist radicals, the authorities have allowed Islam to flourish and become China's most active religion. 13 Million Moslems Statistics from last year's nationwide census indicated that China has about 13 million ethnic Moslems, more than the combined populations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Unofficial estimates put the number closer to 20 million.

Women are now admitted to the Triangle Club, where men once held down all the female roles in the club's shows. The Daily Princetonian named its first female chairman four years ago, and 10 of Princeton's 13 student eating clubs, including Colonial, Cap & Gown and Tower, have women. Despite the dire predictions of some alumni, most of Princeton has adjusted to coeducation since women arrived on campus 14 years ago. But pockets of resistance remain - most notably at what are arguably the three most prominent clubs - Ivy, Cottage and Tiger Inn. None will admit women, and as a result, all are in court. For generations of students, the clubs, clustered along Prospect Street, have been as much a part of the campus as the Princeton Tiger and Nassau Hall. Woodrow Wilson, class of 1879, railed against them, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Class of '17, wrote about them, and, each year, hundreds of students clamor to join them, in an annual rite called bicker.

Going public is almost always a bonanza for the owners of young, growing companies. The founders sell some of their shares to the public and put cash in the bank. But financial strategy is coming full circle. Now, taking companies private is becoming lucrative and popular as well. More and increasingly larger companies are buying back their shares and becoming closely held again, mainly through daring financial deals known as leveraged buyouts. The latest case is Norton Simon Inc. A group led by its chairman and chief executive, David J. Mahoney, last week proposed a $1.65 billion deal to take the consumer products company private. Then last night, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Company, an investment firm that specializes in assembling leveraged buyouts, made a higher offer for a competing group.

Growth of the economy was beginning to stall. The dollar was plunging, and interest rates were soaring. The price of an ounce of gold, the recourse of frightened investors, was climbing above $800. Opinion polls were showing that what people feared most in the economy was no longer unemployment but ever-rising prices. It was then, in July 1979, that President Carter turned to Paul A. Volcker to take over the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board, the one agency in Washington with the power to command a fairly rapid change in the direction of the economy. The night Mr. Volcker acted was a Saturday in October, three months after he was named, and the change he ordered then has produced an economy today that is the polar opposite of the one he inherited. Then, inflation was at more than 10 percent a year and rising, a profoundly worrisome situation that had not been an America problem in peacetime. Under Mr. Volcker, inflation has fallen to less than 5 percent a year, but at the price of an unemployment rate that went from less than 6 percent to more than 10 percent.

Hundreds of thousands of Chileans joined in a national day of protest today against the 10-year-old rule of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. By early tonight more than 200 people were reported to have been arrested around the country. The number was climbing as young people clashed with the police in downtown areas of major cities and entire working-class neighborhoods were blocked off by bonfires and rockthrowing residents. People of all ages and classes joined in defying the Government, banging pots and pans and honking car horns in a planned signal of protest beginning at 8 P.M. Few Injuries Reported The police struck back with tear gas, water cannons and dogs. Even some fashionable apartment towers in the upper-middle-class section of Providencia in this capital came under tear-gas attack as residents banged pots at their windows, creating a deafening din.

An article in Metropolitan Report on Saturday about new directors for two state mental health agencies misidentified Martin S. Begun. He is dean of New York University Medical Center and chairman of New York City's Mental Health Board.

An article Friday about the Indian Point nuclear plants included an incorrect word in a quotation from John F. Ahearne, a member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In explaining why he voted to keep the plants open, he actually said: ''Until receiving the state plan and reviewing it, I had intended to vote to shut the plants down, and in fact had begun drafting an order of views in that direction. I was impressed by the work the state had done.''

Mayor Koch today denounced a proposal to improve pension benefits for state and city workers hired since 1976, even as Governor Cuomo was saying he supported the basic outline of the plan. ''I believe that to enact the proposed amendment would be a mistake of tremendous proportions,'' Mr. Koch said in a letter to legislators, ''and would signal a return to the prefiscal-crisis giveaway of pension benefits.'' Mr. Koch's letter arrived as Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference that he supported ''the parameters'' of the pension improvement, which has been proposed by Warren M. Anderson, Republican of Binghamton, the majority leader of the State Senate.

Conrail's 40,000 employees, in an effort to preserve their jobs, offered today to buy the huge freight-carrying railroad from the Government in a deal they valued at $2 billion. If the proposal is accepted by the Reagan Administration and approved by Congress, it would mean the biggest denationalization of Government-owned assets in American history. The plan also envisages that an employee-owned Conrail, which has begun to show a profit, would sell stock to the public, which would end up owning 20 to 30 percent of the railroad. The rest of the stock would be held by the employees themselves, probably through a stock ownership plan.