What was going on when I was born?

Some years ago Zubin Mehta was quoted as saying that he would never conduct any orchestras in India or Russia, countries hostile to Israel. Now he is taking the New York Philharmonic on a tour of the Far East, partly sponsored by Citi bank, N.A., that will begin in Tokyo on Aug. 15 and culminate with five concerts in Delhi, Calcutta and Bombay, ending Sept. 19. Inconsistency? Change of heart? Mr. Mehta has been known to say things in the heat of the moment and then retract them. When he was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic he had some nasty words to say about the musicians of the New York Philharmonic, in effect charging them with being a spoiled bunch of prima donnas, nowhere near as good a group as his. He would not marry the Philharmonic if it was the last orchestra on earth. Some years later he stood before them, an invited guest. He apologized handsomely - handsomely enough to become its leader not long after that.The other week Mr. Mehta, spoke about India, Israel, music and politics. He was sporting a grey-flecked beard. When he had to cancel a series of concerts last season because of a tennis elbow, his right arm was in a cast and he could not shave. So he let his beard grow. His mother does not like him thus. ''She won't talk to me,'' Mr. Mehta grinned. He was excited about the trip.

With major office, hotel and retail facilites for Manhattan's West Side on the drawing board the developers of a new office project in West 39th Street hope to profit from expected growth in the area by creating a narrow 25-story tower that will incorporate a vacant Con Edison substation. ''The new tower will be a major beneficiary of an expected shift in the axis of new office development from east to west throughout the midtown business district,'' said Arthur Fefferman, senior vice president of Sybedon Corporation.

President Reagan, accusing the Democrats of ''bottling up'' his Administration's legislative package, today signed a measure prohibiting public high schools from barring student gatherings for religious or political purposes outside class hours. In his regular weekly radio address, paid for by his re-election campaign, Mr. Reagan said the legislation he signed this morning ''will allow student religious groups to begin enjoying a right they've too long been denied, the freedom to meet in public high schools during nonschool hours, just as other student groups are allowed to do.'' The President said that it was only after his prodding that the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democrats, agreed to a vote on the measure. Criticism by O'Neill Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., Speaker of the House, said today, ''If President Reagan really cared about his agenda he would have stayed in Washington to work on it and not gone on vacation.''

High costs have priced many families out of the housing market in Bergen County, N.J. But Tributary Woods, a development of clustered town houses under construction in Englewood, will give middle- income buyers the opportunity to purchase homes starting at $115,000 with down payments as low as 5 percent. Ananda DeSilva, the developer and one of the architects, said savings were made possible through advanced construction techniques and by foregoing the usual recreational amenities.

It was 1965 and a gangling teenager stood on the tips of her toes and peered a little nervously into a studio at the Royal Ballet School in London. A brilliant young Russian dancer named Rudolf Nureyev was rehearsing.

WASHINGTON IT has been a century since Catholics in New York were so offended by a Protestant clergyman's labeling the Democrats as ''the party whose antecedents are rum, Romanism and rebellion'' that Republican Senator James G. Blaine narrowly lost the state, and so the Presidential election, to Grover Cleveland. Once again, pronouncements that America has become a secular society notwithstanding, religion is playing a major and potentially divisive role in Presidential politics. Religion in politics has frequently been submerged in the intervening years. But it never went away. And though the current controversy involving President Reagan, Governor Cuomo, Representative Geraldine A. Ferraro and the Roman Catholic hierarchy has deep roots, changed circumstances make it different from anything seen in the past. The debate over who is the more godly, President Reagan or his Democratic opponents, has the characteristics of vintage political demagogy. It is the persistent issue of abortion and how that issue affects the electoral process at all levels that has brought religion into political discourse in such an unusual manner, with Democratic leaders who are Catholic arguing with their church and leaders of the church, as in the statement issued last week by Bishop James W. Malone, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, arguing back.

For some time, economists have been reporting that the economy was entering the slow-growth phase that normally marks the third year of a recovery. This week's flow of economic statistics should confirm this view. On Tuesday, for example, national retail sales figures for July should be up five-tenths of 1 percent, compared with the gain of eight-tenths of 1 percent in June. The gains will be relatively strong largely because of continued vigorous auto sales, said Jack W. Lavery, chief economist at Merrill Lynch. Auto makers are still subsidizing financing costs, he noted, and without auto figures, the gain would be considerably less. ''Consumers are still confident, but their mood may be changing,'' Mr. Lavery said. ''We expect the outstanding consumer credit figure for June on Tuesday to show a rise of $6.5 billion, down from the $10.2 billion rise in May.'' While interest and dividends paid on savings and investments remain the fastest growth sector of personal income, they were offset by smaller wage increases in July. As a result, Mr. Lavery expects personal income figures, due out Friday, to be up six-tenths of 1 percent, compared with eight-tenths of 1 percent rise in June.

THE allocation of the family home and other real-estate holdings at the time of a divorce never has been easy, but changing laws and court rulings are making the task even more complex. In addition, a significant change has just occurred in the Federal tax implications of partition of real estate during divorce. One result of all this is that the buyers of property from one or both parties to a divorce must be careful that they are getting a clear title. Precipitating most major changes has been the introduction in law over the last decade of the concept of equitable distribution - splitting assets based upon the way they were acquired and maintained during the marriage, rather than in whose name they were held. New York has had such a law since 1980, Connecticut since 1977 and New Jersey since 1971. ''Nothing is sure anymore,'' said Raoul Lionel Felder, a Manhattan lawyer specializing in divorce matters. ''Judges now have a lot more discretion.''

Squads of college men and women charged through the leafy woods and across the rolling hills of this military post, their faces smeared with mud and camouflage grease and their green fatigues soaked with rain as they skirmished to the rattle of rifle fire, the burp of machine guns and the boom of cannon. The guns fired blanks, but the rest of it was strenuously real as cadets of the Reserve Officer Training Corps scrambled through the brush under the stern eyes of drill sergeants and tactical instructors. Enrollment Has Been Climbing By the end of summer camp, 2,807 men and 823 women will have completed six weeks of training in this basic summer camp, the only one run by the Army. Most of them will enter the Army as second lieutenants two years from now, the latest recruits in the resurgence of the R.O.T.C. Enrollment in the corps, according to the Army, has more than doubled since the end of the military draft in 1973. It hit bottom after the war in Vietnam, with 33,220 cadets in 1974, but has since climbed almost steadily, to 72,823 this year.

On the occasion of New York Shakespeare Festival's production of ''The Golem'' by H. Leivick, opening this Thursday at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, I have been asked to express an opinion about why the myth of the golem - an artificial man created, among other instances, to defend the Jews of Prague in the sixteenth century - has interested so many creative people in the past and continues to do so even today in our epoch of science and technology. In the Yiddish tradition I will answer the question with a question: why shouldn't this legend have influenced and intrigued creative minds? It possesses the tension and the suspense of the supernatural. It is based on a faith almost as old as the human species - namely, that dead matter is not really dead but can be brought to life. I am not exaggerating when I say that the golem story appears less obsolete today than it seemed one hundred years ago. What are the computers and robots of our time if not golems?

TWO chapters into James Dickey's ''Deliverance,'' the classic moment of classic American fiction recurs, perhaps for the last time. The hero and narrator has a case of the middle-aged blahs, a stifled hopelessness, a stomach- sinking sense that nothing matters, least of all anything he routinely does himself. He therefore accepts an invitation to go white-water canoeing with three friends. On the morning of his departure, his wife asks him whether he really wants to go. Not much, George Stade, a professor of English at Columbia University, is the author of ''Confessions of a Lady- Killer,'' a novel, and the editor of ''European Writers,'' a 12-volume reference work. he says, and then he tells her how low he feels. ''Is it my fault?'' she says. ''Lord, no,'' he says to her, but to the reader he confides that ''It partly was, just as it's any woman's fault who represents normalcy.'' So he takes off.

They had entered the Olympics touted by their coach, Pat Nappi, as the best amateur boxing team ever fielded by the United States. Some of the boxers even boldly predicted a sweep of the 12 divisions, which was dismissed as so much ring bravado. Well, they came close. The Americans set an Olympic record today, winning nine gold medals, among them impressive victories by Mark Breland, Frank Tate and Henry Tillman. The nine golds surpassed the six won by Cuba at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. The Cubans won 10 medals over all at those Games, a record the United States had already eclipsed here in Los Angeles when 11 boxers advanced to the semifinals on Thursday.