What was going on when I was born?

President Reagan said today that the downing of the South Korean airliner had produced ''a fundamental and long overdue reappraisal'' of the Soviet Union in countries around the world and had isolated Moscow in world affairs. Underscoring the White House's efforts to turn the shooting down of a Korean Air Lines 747, in which 269 people died, into a major political coup for the United States, Mr. Reagan said the Russians hoped that ''their crime and cover-up will soon be forgotten and we'll soon get back to business as usual.'' 'Case Is Far From Closed' ''Well, I believe they're badly mistaken,'' he said in his weekly radio address to the nation. ''This case is far from closed.'' ''Good and decent people everywhere are coming together and the world's outrage has not diminished,'' the President said.

VICTORIA FELDMAN had hoped for her own bedroom, but she shares a studio apartment and sleeps on a sofa bed. Robin Kaplan had planned to be independent, but instead she takes money from her parents each month to help pay her rent. Robert Cohen would have liked to live in Manhattan, but the prices drove him first to Queens, then to Brooklyn and, just last week, back to Queens. Each year thousands of young singles come to New York, bearing suitcases and big ambitions, to start their careers and set up their first homes away from home. Fresh out of school and starting their first job, they have detailed visions of the place they want to rent and call their own: A cozy one-bedroom in Greenwich Village. A sleek studio, with a doorman, on the Upper East Side. A monthly rent equal to their weekly salary.

''You can be a la mode for two, maybe three years,'' says Maurice Bejart, director of the Brussels-based - and often controversial - Ballet of the 20th Century. Tuesday evening, the iconoclastic 56-year-old choreographer leads his troupe back to New York for its seventh American visit since 1971, beginning a three-week engagement at City Center. ''We've been performing successfully - for all types of people - for more than 20 years,'' he adds proudly. Mr. Bejart's productions have been regularly greeted with popular acclaim here and in Europe. It must be noted, however, that some American critics, especially, have taken Mr. Bejart to task for supposedly melodramatic sensationalism and a seeming disregard for classical balletic technique. Yet the French-born artist has established his own - perhaps characteristically European - ethos. Physical sensuality, literary and philosophical themes and overt theatricalism are decidedly Bejartian. The choreographer's dictum, ''Une arabesque belle est une arabesque bien sentie'' (''A beautiful arabesque is one well felt''), may not sit well with those who prefer to argue about placement or count fouettes, but it expresses an important aspect of Mr. Bejart's performance credo. ''Ballet is part of the theater,'' he says. ''I want my dancers to be on stage like human people . . . who give emotion to the audience.''

Ray Williams, the flashy, high-scoring guard who led the Knicks to the playoffs in 1981 and then did the same for the Nets in 1982, has been reacquired by the Knicks from Kansas City, the team that had acquired him from the Nets a year ago. In a three-way deal announced yesterday, the Knicks traded Vince Taylor, a second-year guard, and next year's first-round draft choice to the Indiana Pacers for their 6-foot-6-inch guard, Billy Knight, and then sent Knight and an undisclosed amount of cash to Kansas City. ''The New York Knickerbocker organization is very pleased in reacquiring Ray Williams,'' Dave DeBusschere, the Knicks' executive vice president and director of basketball operations, said. ''We all feel that he will be a great addition to our team. Now we have a solid, strong backcourt.''

For several decades many of downtown Newark's greengrocers, butchers and fishmongers have been doing business along a stretch of Mulberry Street known informally as the Mulberry Street market. But as the city's long-term urban renewal project, the Gateway complex, moved closer to Mulberry Street, it seemed for a time that these food merchants would be forced out.

When he was an English major at the University of Michigan, Lawrence Kasdan knew exactly what he wanted to do when he got out into the real world. He wanted to be a film director. Between studying and going to the occasional demonstration - this was the 60's, after all - he spent a lot of time going to the movies and writing scripts, and like most of his friends, he assumed that everything would work out. Those were the heady days, remember, when everything seemed possible; and for a generation convinced of its ability to effect durable social and political change, the prospect of leading ''a full and satisfying creative life'' seemed a small thing to take for granted.

WITH just 43.3 miles of track, a few dozen cars and only 13 employees, the Pocono Northeast Railway doesn't look like a railroad that counts for much. Most of the time, the line seems to go largely unnoticed here, except perhaps when a crossing signal is broken and the traffic on Market Street can't pass. But the Pocono Northeast, with a spirit like that little engine that could, is one of the small cogs - generally called short lines because of their limited run - that are now playing an increasingly vital role in the nation's rail network. In the wake of several giant mergers within the industry and recent deregulation, which removed controls on some freight rates and made it easier for the big railroads to unload unprofitable track, new vigor was injected into short-line ventures. Many new lines, in fact, have already risen from the ashes of the the bankrupt Rock Island, Milwaukee and Penn Central lines. Meanwhile, other systems like the Southern-Pacific, the Chessie and the Burlington Northern are now actively engaged in abandonment programs that will lead to more short-line offspring.

Communities and regions beset by unemployment and a cloudy economic future because of the loss of manufacturing jobs are working diligently to attract companies involved in high technology. But the strategy is unlikely to solve long-term economic problems, according to experts in labor and the workplace. The experts have three main reasons for their conviction: Many more jobs will be lost to industrial layoffs than will be gained in the advanced technology fields in the coming years; the communities that are losing industrial jobs are not likely to be the same ones that attract high technology, and the new jobs generally do not pay nearly so well as the old ones. Communications, electronics, computers and other areas of high technology have not created as many jobs in the past decade as many observers predicted ''and it won't create that many jobs'' in coming decades, asserted Jack Metzgar of Roosevelt University in Chicago, a specialist in the impact of computers on society. Many See Push as Needed Sol C. Chaikin, president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, said, ''High tech will never support the number of jobs we are losing.'' In labor, business and government, an accelerated push for high technology is generally believed mandatory if American industry is to become more competitive.

UNIVERSITIES are expected to provide the infrastructure for the emerging partnership between academia and industry that will, it is hoped, guide New Jersey into an economy based on high technology. A report being prepared by Governor Kean's Commission on Science and Technology tentatively designates new and existing campus buildings and programs as centers for research and collaboration, which it calls academic-industrial centers. In addition to the centers, the commission is expected to recommend: - Matching grants of $10,000 to $250,000 to top people working in areas deemed important to the state's economic growth. - ''Incubation areas,'' which would provide research space and facilities for new companies. - A ''technology extension service'' to inform new entrepreneurs of up-to-the-minute technologies.

The Soviet Union today canceled plans for Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko to attend the United Nations General Assembly. It said the United States had not guaranteed his safety or the proper handling of his official plane. The Government press agency Tass accused Washington of violating ''generally recognized international norms'' in connection with Mr. Gromyko's planned trip, and said the affair raised the question about whether the United States was qualified to provide the headquarters site of the United Nations. (The Soviet decision caught delegates at the United Nations by surprise and Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar issued a statement calling for an ''early and satisfactory solution'' to the impasse. Page 18.)

IT happens every day, said Frank Lombardi. A prospective customer walks into John's Best Pizza Restaurant on Route 7, learns that the only beverages sold there are nonalcoholic, and instantly turns around and leaves without ordering anything. The reason that Mr. Lombardi, the restaurant's manager, does not sell anything stronger than cola to accompany the linguine, scampi and pizza he serves is that Wilton is a dry town. In this 26.8 square-mile community of 17,500 residents, where the average price for a house is $182,000, there are no package stores, no bars, no restaurants that serve liquor and no grocery stores or pharmacies that sell it.

WASHINGTON THE rumors began the moment Ronald Reagan won the election and they spread as the President-elect kept putting off the choice of chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. Surely, the press and much of the academic community speculated, he would turn to Martin S. Feldstein, the 40-year-old Harvard professor who was president of the respected National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Feldstein was the best known of the younger generation of conservative economists that had emerged in the wake of the Democrats' failure to stem inflation or generate steady growth. Mr. Feldstein says he had heard the rumors, but had not been approached. ''I didn't want to come,'' he recounts now. Taking the initiative, he wrote the White House asking not to be considered. But when Murray L. Weidenbaum, the man who did take the job,decided to return home to St. Louis in the summer of 1982, the White House called and Mr. Feldstein was ready - even eager.