Shell behaviour

This is more of a question than an issue.

I see the output of SHELL environment variable is bash

echo $SHELL
/usr/local/bin/bash   

and yet I don't think .bashrc is read. Also cannot execute the following commands

source .bashrc
Cannot read property 'length' of undefined  

. .bashrc
Upterm: command "." not found.   

Apologies if this has been already answered or is not even the goal of this project.