What was going on when I was born?

An obituary of Kay Kyser yesterday gave incorrect dates for the formation of his first band and his departure from Chapel Hill, N.C. He started the band while still in college and took it on the road after graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1928.

A Washington dispatch yesterday about President Reagan's welcome for President Li Xiannian of China incorrectly described Grace Bumbry. Though she has occasionally sung soprano roles, she is a mezzo-soprano.

International India and Sikh leaders have agreed on a package of actions that both sides said would ease anti-Government hostility among Sikhs and speed an end to the turmoil in the state of Punjab. A key part of the settlement calls for a revision in the boundaries of Punjab to increase the Sikh population there and give the Sikhs more opportunity to widen their political influence. [Page A1, Column 6.] France, protesting the crackdown on dissent in South Africa, announced it had suspended all new investment there and recalled its Ambassador. The measures were the most serious taken against Pretoria by a Western country since that Government imposed a state of emergency last weekend and began detaining hundreds of people without charges. [A1:2.]

House and Senate negotiators have tentatively agreed on legislation that would allow the Defense Department to end a 16-year moratorium and resume production of chemical weapons, Congressional and Pentagon sources said today. In a major gain for the Administration, the conferees dropped a House-passed requirement that United States allies in Europe agree to deploy the new weapons before production can begin. The bill would require the President to consult with allies on a plan for deploying the new weapons, sometimes referred to in the Congressional debate as nerve gasses, but the allies' views would not be binding. The agreement was worked out by a panel of House and Senate members, including Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who heads the House Armed Services Committee, and is to be presented Thursday to the full conference committee working on the military programs bill for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1. Aides said approval seemed assured.

''You're wrong - in Islam it is not a must that you wear the veil,'' argued Ekbal Baraka, a member of the Cairo-based Arab Women's Solidarity Association. An Iranian woman shrouded in black, a picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini pinned over her heart, shot back, ''You are a Westerner, you are not a true Moslem, you have lost your soul.'' Miss Baraka, who gave a long paper on the Islamic veil at an informal workshop last week as part of the United Nations Decade for Woman Conference, said as she walked away, ''Well, at least I tried to convince her.'' The brief verbal clash, on the great lawn of the University of Nairobi, illustrated that Moslem women came to Nairobi not only with different agendas and strategies but also with different interpretations of Islam. Throughout the Islamic world, the surge of fundamentalism is reshaping the roles and redefining the rights of Islamic women as Sharia, the 1,300-year-old Islamic code of law, penetrates more legal systems.

The Reagan Administration's campaign to sell its tax revision plan as a boon to middle-income Americans has not taken root in the minds of the public, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. When he submitted his tax proposals to Congress in May, the President said they would ''reduce the tax burdens on the working people of this country,'' and he emphasized that theme in speeches around the country last month. The Times/CBS News Poll indicates, however, that only 13 percent of Americans believe their taxes would be reduced by the President's proposals. Two Americans in five believe their taxes would be raised, and another another two-fifths believe their taxes would remain about the same as they are now.

When the game was won, the employees rose to sing the company song. They took off the blue plastic cowboy hats the company had given them and raised their fists. They sang of Nissan, the automaker: ''Looking at Mount Fuji, surrounded with white clouds in the morning. . . .'' Men peeked at the lyrics on the song card, and the children fell a half-beat behind. But the voice was a single voice, the voice of 4,000 employees of the Nissan Motor Company and their families, chosen by lottery and by exemplary job performance to spend half the workday at the ball park, rooting for the company team in the 56th annual National Intercity Amateur Baseball Tournament. It is an event that might be better named the Corporate Baseball Championship.

While water officials look skyward for rain to ease the water shortage, engineers 600 hundred feet below the city's surface busy themselves on a project that is as vital to the New York City water system as the water level in the reservoirs. At a fenced-in area of Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, near the Hillview Reservoir in Yonkers, sandhogs and and other construction workers descend into a dark shaft, where they are making steady progress on the first stage of the city's Third Water Tunnel. The completed tunnel, a network of huge pipes that will stretch from the Kensico Reservoir in Valhalla, N.Y., to points throughout the city, will supplement the two existing tunnels, the youngest of which is nearly 50 years old. The third tunnel will carry water from existing reservoirs, rather than new sources, but officials promise better delivery and pressure throughout the city.

International OPEC remained in disagreement at its Geneva meeting, and most analysts predicted continued discord when the group tries again today to resolve a pricing dispute. Saudi Arabia wants a bigger differential in pricing heavy and light crude, but Algeria, Libya and Iran refuse to go along. All the other members appear willing to accept a Saudi proposal of a modest cut of 50 cents a barrel in the official price of heavy crude. [Page D1.] Mexico devalued its ''controlled'' currency exchange rate by 20 percent, and announced a $2 billion cut in the nation's $51 billion budget. The ''controlled'' rate is used in the majority of Mexico's foreign currency transactions. The move follows an earlier devaluation of the rate used by private individuals and tourists. [D13.]

A report on Monday about the marriage of Connie Lynn Fruehling and Mark Finell omitted the name of the rabbi who jointly conducted the ceremony with a Methodist minister. He is Rabbi Harold Swiss.

''I think we are managing this thing,'' the City Commissioner of Environmental Protection, Joseph T. McGough Jr., said yesterday. ''We are being prudent, but we are not being hysterical, and I think there is no reason for hysteria.'' Mr. McGough was talking about the drought, which has established itself as the one of the worst in the 56 years of records at his agency. Yesterday, the reservoir system was at 54.1 percent of capacity; the normal for this time of year is 91.6 percent. During the record drought of 1964-65, the reservoirs fell to 25.1 percent.

The House Ways and Means Committee today approved a package of restrictions and cutbacks in the Medicare program designed to reduce projected spending by $10 billion over the next three years. The committee also approved legislation to fine or send to prison doctors who deny emergency hospital treatment to low-income patients without insurance. The committee took action to control the cost of the health insurance program for 30 million elderly and disabled people without waiting for House and Senate conferees to agree on an overall budget resolution for the fiscal year 1986, which begins Oct. 1. Some Novel Proposals The package includes many novel proposals, such as a requirement that private employers offer to continue coverage for the widowed, divorced or separated spouse of any person in a private group health insurance plan. This provision, according to its supporters, was designed mainly to help women whose husbands have died or left them.