What was going on when I was born?

New York City gained 72,000 jobs in the first 10 months of 1984, a larger increase than any single annual gain since 1950, when the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics started measuring employment in the city. In the metropolitan region in the 10 months, employment hit a record of 7.1 million, jobs were created at the second fastest rate in 15 years and inflation edged up slightly, according to the bureau's year-end report on the regional economy, which was released yesterday. ''It seems that 1984 will enter the record books as a banner year for the region,'' Samuel M. Ehrenhalt, the bureau's regional commissioner in New York, said yesterday. The region covers New York City, the suburban New York Counties of Nassau, Suffolk, Westchester, Rockland and Putnam, and the northeastern New Jersey Counties of Bergen, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Morris, Passaic, Somerset and Union.

Despite three years of greatly increased attention, effort and expense, Reagan Administration officials acknowledge that they have not significantly reduced the flow of Western technology to the Soviet Union. In fact, enforcement officials say they have concluded that the methods of smuggling high technology are so varied, and the illegal business so lucrative, that all the United States can ever hope to do is slow the transfer of technology to the East. Soon after President Reagan took office, senior officials decried ''the massive hemorrhage'' of high technology to the Soviet Union and other Eastern bloc nations. Mr. Reagan said that stanching the flow was one of his Administration's priorities. Three years later, the Government has hired hundreds of new enforcement officers and has added tens of millions of dollars to the enforcement agencies' budgets each year. As a result, Federal officers have seized hundreds of pieces of equipment that would have been shipped illegally to the Soviet Union, far more than were being intercepted before.

A man identified as a convict being transported from the Virgin Islands to New York overpowered several guards and hijacked a DC-10 jetliner with 198 people aboard to Cuba, the authorities said. American Airlines flight 626 was commandeered at 6:17 P.M., an hour away from Kennedy International Airport, by a prisoner identified by a corrections official as Ishmael LaBeet, who was convicted of murdering eight people on St. Croix, V.I., in 1972. The plane landed safely at Jose Marti Airport in Havana at 8:30 P.M., the authorities said. Cuban officials said they had taken the hijacker into custody.

Sweeping changes in the way nuclear power is regulated are needed if the industry is to revive from its current torpor, according to utilities, regulators and the industry's critics. No new reactors have been ordered in five years, safety questions are rising faster than they are being resolved, and outsiders and some commission members alike say the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, formed 10 years ago to provide dispassionate regulation, is ineffective. The industry is complaining of the weight of existing regulations and the speed at which they change. The commission has acknowledged strong doubts about the process it uses in one category of safety decisions. The critics say that major areas of safety are given scant attention by the commission.

The American public has given at least $40 million in two months for aid to starving Ethiopians, a response that exceeds any outpouring of United States aid in more than a decade, according to relief officials. In the two months since graphic television pictures about the drought and its effects began appearing in the United States, scores of aid agencies have reported a sharp increase in contributions. Leading American aid agencies have received the $40 million in donations since those reports at the end of October, according to Peter J. Davies, president of Interaction, a coalition of 121 private agencies that provide emergency and developmental aid abroad or work with refugees. Interaction was formed in July.

In March 1983, in an act of intense frustration, Dr. William C. DeVries burned the diary he started keeping soon after he implanted the first permanent artificial heart in Dr. Barney B. Clark at the University of Utah in December 1982. The diary, he said in an interview, contained his feelings about himself, about the patient who volunteered for one of the riskiest experiments in history, and about the surgeon's pain over criticism of the artificial heart program from colleagues he admired. Had the diary survived, it would clearly have important insights into the reactions of a medical investigator to the controversies that swirled around him and around an extraordinary experiment that, if successful, could have enormous medical, economic, social, political and ethical consequences.

A Manhattan man surrendered to the Concord, N.H., police yesterday, saying he was the gunman who wounded four teen-agers on a subway car 10 days ago, police officials said. They said the man, Bernhard Hugo Goetz, 37 years old, of 55 West 14th Street, had already been identified as a suspect in the shooting, which took place after the teen-agers approached him and asked him for money. The police said Mr. Goetz, a slim man with blond hair, matched a police composite drawing of the suspect, who escaped into the subway tunnel after the shooting. Hundreds Expressed Support A special telephone line that police set up to receive tips to lead them to a suspect instead attracted hundreds of callers who expressed support for the gunman's actions. Some people offered to help pay legal expenses and others suggested that he run for Mayor.

A congress of 800 Chinese poets, novelists and playwrights has called on the Communist Party to reject past restrictions on artistic freedom and restore China to the forefront of world culture. The call, issued by the Chinese Writers' Association in meetings that began here over the weekend, represented the clearest demand for artistic freedom since an ill-fated burst of self- expression brought a sweeping crackdown 27 years ago. ''We need works that can compare with the magnificent literary creations of our people in the past, and with the most famous works of mankind,'' said Ba Jin, the 80-year-old chairman of the Writers' Association and the author of one of this century's most famous Chinese novels. Rare Scenes of Spontaneity Amid scenes of spontaneity rarely witnessed at any official gathering in China, delegates to the Writers' Association's congress have been insisting that there must never again be a return to the misery of the ''hundred flowers'' period in 1957 and the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, when some of the country's most famous writers were hounded into suicide, died for lack of proper medical care or were sent to farm areas to work with pigs.

A Soviet scientist predicted the other day that 290 quadrillion snowflakes would fall here on New Year's Eve. A quadrillion, he said, is a million billions. The prediction, printed in Moscow's evening newspaper, Vechernyaya Moskva, was only half in jest, involving a multiplication of the city area by the depth of snowfall expected by the size of a snowflake. It was one of a number of newspaper articles combating a rumor that the temperature over the weekend - or perhaps next weekend - was to drop to 40 degrees below zero.

The Mafia has come under strong attack here as a result of far-reaching changes in Sicilian political and social life, many Sicilians say. The stepped-up assault on organized crime, many believe, has permanently altered the relationship between the Mafia and the people of this Mediterranean island at the southern edge of Italy. Magistrates, politicians, church leaders and ordinary Sicilians who express this view do not play down the importance of recent police breakthroughs, notably the confessions of a former Mafia leader, Tomasso Buscetta. Nor do they argue that the war on the Mafia has been won. Indeed, some Sicilian authorities contend that in certain respects, the Sicilian Mafia is more powerful than it was a decade ago.

A bomb blast damaged a building housing military offices of the French Embassy in Bonn early today but no one was hurt, the police said.

Amid thunderous applause and the pop of hundreds of flashbulbs, 40-year-old Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in today as India's sixth Prime Minister. Mr. Gandhi's 39-member Council of Ministers, a blend of the young and the experienced, was also formally installed during the ceremonies at the presidential palace. Soon afterward, a relaxed and smiling Prime Minister, buoyed by the biggest election victory by any party since India became independent in 1947, said that his Government would be ''performance and efficiency oriented.'' Mr. Gandhi, who was first installed as Prime Minister in October after his mother, Indira Gandhi, was assassinated, told reporters that he would ''monitor'' the performance of ministers and dismiss those who proved ineffective.