What was going on when I was born?

Congress is debating a bill that would give the Synthetic Fuels Corporation a new lease on life, not by giving it more money but by taking money away. Language that would take $5.2 billion from the corporation is part of a Senate version of the stopgap money bill that Congress must pass before adjournment later this week. President Reagan proposed such a rescission last spring and said that until Congress approved it, he would not appoint the directors the corporation needs to muster a quorum and do business. The corporation is poised to make financial aid commitments for eight synthetic fuels plants, ending a half year of inactivity.

Mutual funds, in part promoted for their professional management, have again failed to give investors an advantage in the stock market. For the fifth consecutive quarter, the average gain for equity funds failed to match the Standard & Poor's index of 500 stocks, the benchmark against which most money managers are usually measured. In three-month period ended Sept. 30, equity funds increased an average of 6.48 percent, with utility funds generally doing the best and gold funds clearly doing the worst. That compared with a 9.69 percent climb for the S. & P. 500. The figures, released yesterday by Lipper Analytical Services Inc., assume all dividends were reinvested.

Almost one adult American in five has a mental disorder and the rates are about equal for men and women, according to a federally sponsored survey, the most comprehensive ever done of psychiatric problems in the United States. Finding equal rates for men and women was particularly surprising, according to Dr. Darrel A. Regier, of the National Institute of Mental Health, director of the study. He said it had been widely believed that women were more prone than men to mental problems, probably because previous studies gave disproportionate emphasis to anxieties, depression, phobias and related disorders that are more common among women. Problems more common among men, including antisocial personality and drug and alcohol abuse were also covered in the new broad survey. Drugs included narcotics and potentially dangerous medicinal products. Tobacco was not included among the drugs of abuse studied in the survey.

It's been raining over much of France, and the low, gray sky that seems to hover just above the chimney pots of Paris reflects the spirit of wine makers from Bordeaux to Beaune, from St.-Emilion to Epernay, from Vouvray to Riquewihr. Of course, wine makers are particularly sensitive to weather, so a few good days will raise their spirits. On gloomy days everyone likes to recall the miraculous vintage of 1978, when a disastrous summer of clouds and rain in Bordeaux and Burgundy gave way at the end of September to warm, arid days that went on and on, drying the grapes and maturing them into the raw material for great wine. It could happen again and one day it may, but probably not in 1984. The forecast was for rain through the week over most of the important vineyard regions.

The Advertising Column in Business Day Sept. 21 incorrectly reported an advertising assignment made by the Charles of the Ritz Group to Lord, Geller, Federico, Einstein Inc. It was for the Charles of the Ritz brand and the Alexandra de Markoff cosmetics line.

HARDLY a day seems to pass without news that someone has been arrested on charges of sexually abusing children. Staff members at a day-care center in Manhattan Beach, Calif., teachers at day- care facilities in New York, adults in Jordan, Minn. - all are being prosecuted in incidents involving child molestation. The furor over these groups is raising questions for parents nationwide about what is proper in their own relationships with children. Where, they are asking, should the line be drawn between affectionate physical contact and that which is sexual, between discipline and physical abuse? According to the National Center for Child Abuse in Washington, more than a million children are reported to have been abused in some manner each year. Studies and surveys conducted by psychologists and sexual therapists indicate that 30 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys are sexually molested before age 18.

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1984 International Egypt's President accused Libya of having plotted to attack Egypt's Aswan High Dam and the Suez Canal. President Hosni Mubarak was quoted in an Egyptian newspaper as saying that after learning of the plots, he had sent a letter to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, containing what he called an ''unequivocal warning.'' (Page A1, Column 3.) President Reagan took responsibility as Commander in Chief of the recent bombing at the United States Embassy in Lebanon. While campaigning in Texas, he told reporters that ''I'm not going to deliver somebody's head up on a platter, which seems to be the request of so many when things like this happen. (A11:1.)

'' IT'S incredible how people soothe themselves with food from the past,'' said Lynne Bien, who turns out one of the most soothing chicken potpies around at her restaurant and carryout called Pie in the Sky on Third Avenue near 17th Street. ''Our taste buds are formed in our early years and no matter how sophisticated we become in dining, we always seem to have a hankering for those foods. I can see it in the reaction of our customers.'' At the seven-month-old Yellow Rose Cafe on Amsterdam Avenue near 81st Street, where one can find the most down- home smothered pork chops, fried chicken and mashed potatoes in New York, the Texas-born co-owner, Barbara Clifford, observes the same phenomenon. ''Everybody remembers when they were kids going over to grandma's house for dinner,'' she said, watching a table of customers excavate mountains of delightfully lumpy mashed potatoes. ''Some people get absolutely homesick over this kind of food. In fact, I almost called this place the Homesick Cafe.'' Amid all the interest over the latest culinary trends, such as Tex-Mex, Cajun and Creole, post-nouvelle French and nouvelle American, there seems to be a swelling undercurrent of nostalgia for the basic, ingenuous American foods of earlier generations. Pot roast, meat pies, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, meat loaf, croquettes, apple pie and even that inspired invention of the frugal housewife, bread pudding, all are becoming respectable again.

Federal prosecutors said yesterday that investigators had uncovered evidence of a previously unknown United States arm of the Sicilian Mafia that operated independently of American organized crime. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the existence of such a group had come as a surprise to American law enforcement officials. ''This is a whole new revelation,'' he said. He likened the Sicilian group operating in the United States and American organized crime to ''two corporations that for 20 years were doing business with each other.''

These days the partners at Price Waterhouse and Deloitte Haskins & Sells are making the rounds in Washington and huddling with clients across the country to ease any apprehensions over the prospective marriage of the two huge accounting firms. As well they might. The prospect of two premier firms combining to form what would easily be the world's largest public accounting firm, a goliath dwarfing all competitors, has shaken the accounting field. A worldwide partnership with revenues of nearly $2 billion and some 50,000 people under the same professional roof would clearly be something new under the sun. ''We were stunned,'' Norman Klein, managing partner of Fox & Company, said, recalling his reaction to the proposed merger, a union of the fourth- and eighth-largest firms.

Early this year, Diana Ross faced a public-relations problem that was assuming huge proportions. Not only had rain and rioting marred the free concert she gave in Central Park six months earlier, but the the singer's film company was contending that, despite the sale of cable-television rights and other income, the event had not produced expected profits that were to help finance a new playground in the park. What to do? Peter Tufo, her lawyer and one experienced in the ways of the city, came up with an answer: Call Howard Rubenstein. Mr. Rubenstein, a public-relations man, has for a decade had a special feeling for what it takes to soothe ruffled feelings at City Hall.

Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan pleaded not guilty yesterday to a 137-count indictment charging him with participation in a multimillion- dollar scheme to defraud the New York City Transit Authority. The indictment, which was released publicly after Mr. Donovan was arraigned in State Supreme Court in the Bronx, charged him and nine other people with grand larceny, falsifying documents and filing false documents. The purported misconduct by Mr. Donovan occurred before he joined the Reagan Administration in 1981, prosecutors said. Granted Leave of Absence Mr. Donovan, who has been granted a leave of absence from his post to defend himself, said the indictment was part of a politically motivated ''inquisition'' by the Bronx District Attorney, Mario Merola. ''Mr. Merola may have won today's battle by misuse of his office,'' Mr. Donovan told reporters in a courthouse hallway, ''but he will not win the war.''