What was going on when I was born?

Video machines have come to the Soviet Union and the Government does not like what it sees. An underground millionaire, queen of the black market in a provincial town, greets visitors at her garish home. Opulent carpets line the walls, chandeliers glitter, fruits overflow from huge bowls. But the prize acquisition shown the visitors is a Japanese video machine on which ''Afrique Simon,'' a rock star popular across Russia, sways and gyrates.

President Reagan met today with the members of his commission on Central America, and later the panel's chairman, Henry A. Kissinger, said he and his colleagues had found the situation in the region ''graver than most of us had expected.'' Mr. Kissinger said the 12-member bipartisan commission, which recently returned from a six-day trip to the five Central American nations and Panama, was not ready to submit any recommendations to President Reagan. But he said after the group's 35- minute session with the President that unless the region's problems ''are alleviated, we will be faced with an explosive situation.'' In another diplomatic development, the Administration spurned a Nicaraguan plan in which Managua offered a pledge not to support the guerrilla movement in El Salvador if the United States would halt support for Nicaraguan rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista Government.

The State Education Department said today that the plan of the Board of Regents to improve curriculum and add rigor to elementary and secondary education throughout New York would cost $2.9 billion. In 1984, the first year of the five-year plan, the cost is expected to be $209 million. Department officials said they assumed the plan would be financed by a combination of local, state and Federal funds, but declined to estimate what percentage would be required of each. Nor would they say whether new local or state taxes would be necessary.

A 10-ship United States task force that had been headed for duty off Lebanon has been diverted and sent instead toward Grenada as a precautionary measure, a Defense Department official said tonight. The official said the force included 1,900 marines, some of whom had been scheduled to relieve American members of the multinational force in Lebanon. The diversion was a precautionary measure in the event that the approximately 1,200 Americans on Grenada are endangered by the overthrow of the Government there, the official said. No Immediate Danger He emphasized that there was no indication that the Americans faced any immediate danger.

Working Toward an Untarnished Image In cool but sunny weather yesterday in Central Park, Steven A. Tatti sat perched in the lap of a bronze statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck, the 19th-century poet, as he worked to clean it. Today is expected to be clear and milder. z

Senator Pete V. Domenici, chairman of the Budget Committee, warned the Senate today that the economic recovery could be choked off unless Congress moved quickly to reduce budget deficits through spending reductions and tax increases. The New Mexico Republican's warning was prompted by increasing indications that Congress would not reduce the budget deficit significantly before the lawmakers end their current session, probably next month. And most members of Congress agree that unless they act soon, all attempts to reduce the deficit will be put off until after next year's elections. In a speech on the Senate floor and in comments to reporters later, Senator Domenici said the deficit could exceed $200 billion in the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. ''I believe we cannot gamble with the nation's economic future,'' he said. ''I believe we must act now.''

Three former officials of Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories, once one of the largest chemical testing concerns, were found guilty today of trying to defraud the Government and some drug and pesticide manufacturers by covering up inaccurate research data. A Federal jury found the three men guilty after a six-month trial. One of the men could be sentenced to a maximum of 30 years in prison and the two others could receive sentences of 15 and 25 years. The research company, based in Northbrook, Ill., was one of the oldest in the country. From its founding in 1952 to its closing in 1978, it conducted 22,000 studies, and almost half of them

The United States has been secretly training a Jordanian strike force for use in military emergencies in the Persian Gulf, Government officials said today. They said the training had been under way for the last two and a half years. It was learned last week that the Reagan Administration was seeking $220 million in secret financing for a Jordanian force. But it was not known then that the force had already started training with American Special Forces troops and had engaged in joint exercises with them.

''They forget that Cassandra was right,'' said Aurelio Peccei, the amiable and optimistic man who founded and presides over the Club of Rome. Eleven years ago, the club's study, ''The Limits to Growth,'' cast a chill over the buoyantly producing, reproducing and consuming world by predicting that mankind faced catastrophe within a century unless it acted quickly to establish an equilibrium in which population growth, industrialization and the depletion of resources were halted. Since publication of the report, which was prepared by an international research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the club has sponsored a continuing series of more limited studies and international conferences that have elaborated on the same theme. Mr. Peccei recently returned to his elegant Rome apartment from a conference in Budapest devoted to the discouraging question of how by the end of ths century the world will manage to feed six billion mouths. He heard some gloomy papers, bearing particularly on a likelihood that the capacity of the United States to make up much of the rest of the world's food deficit is diminishing.

ARI L. GOLDMAN UNITED NATIONS, N.Y., Oct. 21 - A special tax-exempt fund has been set up to help the members of the Chad Mission to the United Nations buy food and pay rent. About $15,000 has already been pledged by corporations and individuals to alleviate the plight of the diplomats, according to an official familiar with the effort. The contributions will be channeled through the Phelps-Stokes Fund, an educational foundation specializing in African countries. Franklin H. Williams, president of the fund, said today that the money would be used for humanitarian purposes.

-ULM, West Germany, Oct. 21 - Several hundred demonstrators protesting the planned deployment of Pershing 2 missiles in West Germany blocked the main entrance to a United States Army base here today. The action was part of a series of protests that is scheduled to culminate Saturday in a chain of protesters who will link arms from the Army's Wiley barracks here to Army headquarters in Stuttgart, about 65 miles away.

President Ferdinand E. Marcos has decided that the new commission of inquiry into the death of the opposition leader Benigno S. Aquino Jr. should consist entirely of private citizens, the Philippine Government announced today. The decision, which means that plans to include two members of the National Assembly on the panel have been dropped, appeared to meet in part at least opposition demands that only private citizens be called upon to serve. But it was expected that Mr. Marcos would still choose its members from nominations by bar associations, student and teacher groups and business and labor. The opposition has charged that any Marcos commission could not conduct an unbiased investigation of the death of Mr. Aquino, who was shot at the airport Aug. 21 as he returned from three years' exile in the United States.